Stephen Gerringer
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Thanks Robert, and James, for your kind words and your concern. It took 9 days to get results (after having to schedule the test four days in advance because our county is so overwhelmed), but the good news is that my wife and I both tested negative. Ironically, that’s just one day short of the official incubation period . . .
(That lag in time seems the battle before us in so many places across the United States. If it takes more than three days to find out if one has the virus, the odds of those who are positive infecting others increases exponentially – and I can attest that the uncertainty weighs on one’s mind while waiting.)
Thanks, Mars – I wasn’t aware we had lost the Edit and Delete functions! (My admin panel doesn’t show me what you see, so I have to log-in on my wife’s profile through her PC for the user perspective.)
The Edit button should be restored now. Delete is still inactive, but our tech guru is aware and working on it.
(You’ll find posts with Forum Guidelines and an FAQ about posting pasted to the top of every forum, including the Meet & Greet section, which should provide some guidance)
Starting a conversation, Mark, is pretty much the same as saying hello in this thread. Some posts are brief, some are long; despite my own tendency toward excessive verbosity, I have yet to bump up against a word limit. Feel free to peruse some of the threads in the other forums (most of which are at least tangentially related to the overarching theme of that forum) to get an idea; you might consider posting in the Conversation with a Thousand Faces forum, which serves as a catch-all for any topics that don’t seem to fit in the other forums.
Quote anyone you would like. We do ask that you steer clear of contemporary politics, but anything related to one or another of Joseph Campbell’s many areas of interest (not just mythology, but depth psychology, the arts, comparative religion, archaeology and anthropology, biology, creativity, dreams, imagination, writing . . . even quantum physics) is appropriate.
Feel free to use the block quote function if citing lengthy passages (or quoting something from a previous poster in a thread you are responding to); for hyperlinks, do what I did above with the Conversation with a Thousand Faces forum – highlight what you want to link, then click the hyperlink icon (looks like a diagonal paperclip), and we’d prefer it if you check the option to “open link in a new window” when you do so.
And if you would like to know when someone replies (conversation threads, as you may have noticed already, tend to unfold at a more leisurely pace here than on social media), check the “Notify me of follow-up replies via email” box at the bottom of your post before clicking “Submit.”
That is indeed a difficult concept to wrap one’s head around, Johanna. Elsewhere Campbell refers to this as the bodhisattva formula: “Joyful participation in the sorrows of the world.”
It sounds calloused and uncaring when taken out of context, but even those familiar with Joseph Campbell’s body of work can find this a difficult principle to absorb, especially in light of personal or collective tragedy. Some critics complain Campbell is encouraging passive acceptance of poverty, injustice and catastrophe. But it’s not so black and white, not an either/or – definitely more nuanced and complex than that.
When we remove humans from the equation and focus on the natural world, it’s a little easier to understand Campbell’s point. Here he expands on the concept in response to questions at the end of a lecture on Hinduism and Buddhism:
CAMPBELL: I saw a picture several years ago in an issue of National Geographic of three cheetahs eating a gazelle. The gazelle was still alive. They were at his belly, and the gazelle’s head was lifted. And I said to myself, “Do we say yes to that?” We do.
Q: The way you are talking about “saying yea” to it all – doesn’t that risk condoning immorality?
Sure. That’s what’s tough about it; it’s the essence of the problem. How long can you look at it? How deeply can you see? What can you take? Or are you going to play a little game: “Listen to the birds, aren’t they just sweet? Don’t look at the gazelle being eaten by three cheetahs.”
You make your choice. If you want to be a moralist, go ahead. If you want to go love life, do – but know that life is nasty. And it will involve death. Sorrow is part of the world.
Q: So we participate in life’s violence?
CAMPBELL: No, you don’t participate in it, but you can’t condemn it; this is part of life.
It takes an awful lot of guts really to say yes all the way. Do you have the energy and strength to face life? Life can ask more of you than you’re willing to give. And then you say, “Life is something that should not have been. I’m not going to play the game. I’m going to meditate. I’m going to pull out.”
Through life and lust one comes to know something. And then there are two ways of knowing it: one, simply in its sensational aspect, and the other in the way of the mystery that is speaking to you through these. It’s the same mystery, birth and death, and this is the way life works.
Then there are two ways of participating. One is compulsively. The other, after you’ve got something of the experience, is to gain control of your dealing with life and death. It’s a delicate walking on the edge. If you do too much to control life, you kill it. The other option is to let life move.
When it comes to cheetahs eating a gazelle, that’s the way of nature – it’s easier to accept that. Disturbing as the sight may be, there is no moral calculus to it: we don’t expect gazelles to go to heaven while all cheetahs rot in hell.
But “saying yea to it all” doesn’t apply exclusively to the natural world (or maybe it does, when we remember that humanity itself is a part of nature). Campbell even singles out sinister examples of man’s inhumanity to man – Hiroshima, Auschwitz, the firebombing of Dresden, the rape of Tibet.
“Joyful participation” is not simply adopting a Pollyanna perspective, jollying one’s way through catastrophe and ruin: rather than retreating into denial, one instead fully embraces the experience. Campbell points to Victor Frankl losing his wife, and nearly his own life, in a German concentration camp, and to a Buddhist monk and colleague of Campbell’s who had seen family and friends slaughtered during the Chinese annexation of Tibet. These are individuals who “joyfully participated” by fully experiencing what life presented them, and who emerged from these experiences not harboring bitterness and hatred, but with compassion for all – even for those who injured them most!
Campbell isn’t saying we have to acquiesce in evil, accept it as inevitable and resign ourselves to being victims. But as the Wheel turns, wherever we are – whether tasting Paradise, or enduring Hell – we are best off if we embrace each moment and experience the full range of emotions, the ecstasy and the agony of life. It is this that Campbell means by “joyful participation.”
Does this perspective lead to passive acceptance of evil and suffering, fostering a victim mentality? Hardly …
There are two aspects to a thing of this kind. One is your judgment in the field of time, and the other is your judgment as a metaphysical observer. You can’t say there shouldn’t be poisonous serpents – that’s the way life is. But in the field of action, if you see a poisonous serpent about to bite somebody, you kill it. That’s not saying no to the serpent, that’s saying no to that situation.”
(Campbell, Power of Myth, p. 83)
Yes, Campbell does observe, “We cannot cure the world of sorrows . . . 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’s always been a mess. We are not going to change it,” he is speaking from the perspective of that metaphysical observer. But he also notes that doesn’t mean you don’t go out and march against the atom bomb (or racism, social injustice, etc.); doing so is not saying no to the world, but “saying no to that situation.”
In other traditions, good and evil are relative to the position in which you are standing. What is good for one is evil for the other. And you play your part, not withdrawing from the world when you realize how horrible it is, but seeing that this horror is simply the foreground of a wonder: a mysterium tremendum et fascinans.
“All life is sorrowful” is the first Buddhist saying, and so it is. It wouldn’t be life if there weren’t temporality involved, which is sorrow – loss, loss, loss. You’ve got to say yes to life and see it as magnificent this way; for this is surely the way God intended it …
It is joyful just as it is. I don’t believe there was anybody who intended it, but this is the way it is. James Joyce has a memorable line: “History is a nightmare from which I am trying to awake.” And the way to wake from it is not to be afraid, and to recognize that all of this, as it is, is a manifestation of the horrendous power that is of all creation. The ends of things are always painful. But pain is part of there being a world at all …
I will participate in the game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera – except that it hurts.
(Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth, pp. 80-81)
I have yet to meet anyone who perfectly embodies this concept – just not that many living bodhisattvas in my neighborhood, I guess – but I do notice the more I’m able to consciously cultivate this attitude, the less likely I am to either magnify or deny the suffering I do encounter. Ironically, the conscious acknowledgment and embrace of the pain inevitable to living and dying actually dissipates much of my unnecessary, self-generated suffering, leaving me better equipped to deal with what life throws at me.
Somehow this slipped right past me, Nandu (that’s a good sign – Conversations of a Higher Order now has enough participants that it’s getting harder to keep track of all the conversations in play!).
This approach is inspired! I especially like the way you move back and forth between a relatively objective journalistic voice and that of a gossip columnist. Given the length of the Mahabharata versus today’s short attention span, this could conceivably be the best way to distill its essence to the social media generation.
When can we expect the next installment?
My moniker in my retro hippie days was Saint Stephen, from the Grateful Dead song, rather than a scriptural allusion. However, I have often noted that Stephen was, after all, the first person to “get stoned” in the New Testament. Embracing a somewhat different meaning of the term, I have done my best over the years to live up to my namesake’s legend . . .
Astute observation and associations arising from John Bucher’s Tiger King entry in JCF’s MythBlast series (in fact, since John’s essay opened the door for this, I tried to give your post it’s own topic in the MythBlast forum; something went awry and your post opens a new topic here in the Works of Joseph Campbell forum – which is just as appropriate, since the story of the Tiger and the Goats Campbell shares provides the foundation).
This also might be a good place to share a link, if you have one, to info for the book of yours, Toby, that you reference above with the tiger on the cover, about what you learned from Joseph Campbell.
Robert and James,
Sorry for being awol of late. It’s been a brutal week, with life throwing up lots of roadblocks – including a possible coronavirus exposure following an outbreak in the department across the hall in the building where my wife works, and now one of her coworkers in her office is sick with Covid; we’re on Day 4 awaiting results from our tests, which does a bit of a number on your head (back in March and April spring allergies regularly had me convinced I had Covid on an almost daily basis; waiting for notification, that dynamic is intensified many times over – given the expanded list of symptoms we know of today, at some point in the course of every day my imagination gets the better of me). I find myself wondering if I should be putting my affairs in order, or counting on a last minute reprieve from the governor . . .
which brings home the quote you cite from Power of Myth, Robert:
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.”
I have to admit this is easier said than done when facing one’s own mortality – but I do take comfort in these words. Well or ill, live or die, “this is what I need” . . .
Good question!
I notice there’s a lot in JCF’s Campbell in Culture database referencing the DC Universe – no surprise, considering in the film Batman vs. Superman, Wonder Woman’s sword had a quote from Campbell’s Goddesses: Mysteries of the Feminine Divine inscribed on her sword (in ancient Greek), while Superman’s cape was embroidered with a quote in Kryptonian from The Hero with a Thousand Faces.
However, I see nothing in the database referring to Marvel films, though there seems no dearth of Joe in the Marvel Universe – plenty of material on the internet, from film critics and fans alike, identifying elements of the hero’s journey in films from Ironman to Guardians of the Galaxy, Black Panther, and various chapters of the Avengers saga. Time and again individual superheroes are clearly following the trajectory of the hero’s journey – but I believe the overarching saga of the Avengers and their allies across multiple movies present us with a collective hero following that trajectory.
I am so sorry to be tardy in replying, Mark – it’s been a brutal week (including my first Covid test in the wake of a potential exposure to through my wife’s work – four days later, results still pending).
Are the spiritual uses of psychedelics an appropriate topic in Conversations of a Higher Order? Well, even though he never indulged himself, Joseph Campbell enjoyed friendships with Albert Hofmann, the Swiss chemist who first synthesized LSD in 1938, Huston Smith, the noted religious studies scholar involved in early psychedelic research at Harvard, Alan Watts, celebrated author and mystic who was no stranger to LSD, Stanislav Grof, known for his research into the nature of consciousness (including observation and documentation of thousands of LSD research sessions at the Psychiatric Research Institute in Prague and the Maryland Psychiatric Research center in Baltimore) and a frequent collaborator with Campbell at Esalen seminars, and the Grateful Dead, who occupied the epicenter of psychedelic counterculture for over three decades.
Sure seems Campbell considered the topic appropriate, which works for me (not to mention how psychedelics spiritually transformed my own life). Please do start a discussion on this in The Conversation with a Thousand Faces forum – it’s an inspired idea. Even if it’s just you and me at first, I have no doubt others who share our enthusiasm will eventually join in . . .
What a sweet tale, laurelb, and not at all what I expected! (I figured this was the tale of the princess, her ball, and the frog prince who retrieved it for her.) Well done!
Aloberhoulser writes:
Offices and cubicles with desks sit empty and hospitals aren’t filled to capacity.
So much has changed in just a month. Hospitals in Arizona are nearing capacity, as they are in multiple jurisdictions in Texas and Florida, and elsewhere (my nephew, a nurse, tells me his hospital is getting slammed, working extended overtime shifts as multiple co-workers have been infected).
Offices and cubicles are no longer empty – so in the building where my wife works, the department across the hall from her office has a cluster of infected employees – and we have just learned one of her co-workers in her office is sick with a serious case of Covid. Des’ job is IT, which means greater exposure as she often has to interact with employees and their equipment at their workstation; as a result, we have both been approved to be tested – right as our county is in the midst of a surge and our hospitals are near capacity, a result of widespread local noncompliance with guidelines as our community was opening up in late May and early June.
Disconcerting, yes, as I have multiple underlying conditions (though we are starting to lose young healthy people as well, with the first deaths of individuals under age 50 reported just last week). Even though I hope for the best, the virus does not really care how positive my thinking is or what’s in my heart, is I am addressing matters I have been putting off in case the worst occurs.
I’m not sure “a collective catharsis” is what’s required – but I do believe that what is happening is a collective death-and-rebirth experience (the metaphorical significance underscored by half a million deaths worldwide so far). Curious what will emerge the other side of that . . .
Just as a bit of an addendum, my county in California is experiencing a huge spike, with hospitalizations nearing capacity (though ICU beds remain available, staffing to care for patients is close to maxed out). So it was bit disconcerting to find out last week that in the county building where my wife works a cluster of employees in the department across the hall had been infected – and then this week we learned one of my wife’s co-workers is sick with Covid-19.
My wife works in IT; even though everyone is being careful and, thanks to a statewide order, finally masked, she is particularly at risk as she often needs to interact with employees and their equipment at their workstations. As a result, we have both been approved for coronavirus tests (if you count age I have four underlying conditions, two of which make me really high risk). Given the high demand the earliest appointment available is after the 4th of July weekend . . . and then it will take 4 to 6 days to get the results.
Naturally, the uncertainty is disconcerting – living in limbo is no fun – but until we learn more or symptoms manifest, the best thing I can do is remember to Breathe . . .
I fully understand the plight of too many books and not enough time. The Japanese term for buying more books than you can read is tsundoku – an incurable condition for me.
I credit Campbell for turning me on to Carl Jung. I purchased The Portable Jung primarily for Campbell’s foreword (still one of the most succinct accounts of Jung’s intellectual development and the trajectory of the Freud-Jung relationship until recent years; I find Deirdre Bair’s 2008 Jung: A Biography the most thorough and comprehensive – and am disappointed to learn she just passed away in April at the age of 84), but then I started reading the selections from Jung, and from there had no choice but to start collecting the Collected Works – absolutely mind-blowing!
Carl Jung, like Campbell, is one of the rare nonfiction authors I can read and re-read. Every time I read a passage I’ve read before, it’s like peeling an onion – layer after layer after layer of new and deeper insights. Outside the Collected Works, I can’t recommend highly enough Dream Analysis: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1928 – 1930 by C.G. Jung, (ed. William McGuire), thicker than most volumes in the CW and conducted in English by Jung, and Children’s Dreams: Notes from the Seminar Given in 1936 – 1940 by C.G. Jung. (Though Jung often mentions using active imagination, he never fully describes this technique – but in these seminars he delves more fully into that with examples galore).
I suspect the piece on dilettantes you reference might be A Dilettante Among Symbols, the foreword from Heinrich Zimmer’s The King and the Corpse (edited by Campbell), a sweet essay – especially for those of us eschew academic specialization. I’m reminded of Campbell’s discussion re specialization:
A specialist can come up and say, in all seriousness, ‘The people in the Congo have five fingers on their right hand.’ If I say, ‘Well, the people in Alaska have five fingers on their right hand,’ I’m called a generalist. And if I say that the people in the caves in 30,000 B.C. had five fingers on their right hand, I’m a mystic!”
As for science fiction and fantasy, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, J.R.R. Tolkien, and Ursula K. LeGuin populate my personal pantheon (authors who create an incredibly detailed universe that is a setting for multiple novels).
You might consider starting a discussion on Jung, Mark, or on science fiction authors, in The Conversation with a Thousand Faces forum (your first post needn’t be too detailed – you could pretty much cut-and-paste what you said about Jung above), rather than burying it in the Meet & Greet forum (I suspect a lot of people would love to weigh in on Jung, or on sci-fi, but are unlikely to stumble across it here).
