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The balance of sacrifice and reward: a chemical analogy
If you’re getting your dopamine from a source that does not require some form of effort on your part, beware!
Dr. Andrew Huberman (Neurobiologist)
This, you probably already know. But just in case, and in (very) brief, dopamine is the chief chemical responsible for experiences of fulfillment, meaning, reward and novelty. Every time we do something that introduces dopamine to the bloodstream, we get so-called “dopamine hits.” And when, for example, I eat an avocado, the dopamine is what makes me feel good and fulfilled.
A less healthy example of getting dopamine, and one that does not require effort, is when I keep scrolling like a zombie through lists of news headlines on my smartphone, inducing cheap dopamine-hits in an attempt to sate my appetite to experience something new. However, as I get my fix in this listless way, something simultaneously drains my soul.
Whether it is cheaply acquired or not, the unfortunate news is that any dopamine surge will cause one’s dopamine baseline to drop, requiring either an increase in speed or magnitude of the dopamine-inducing activity (which then lowers the baseline even further), OR one can escape the catch-22 by initiating an act of replenishment.
To accomplish this, Huberman’s formula (above) emphasizes effort. This replenishment can be effort in the more concrete sense of the physical exertion that drives such things as running, weightlifting, walking, gardening, and so on. Or, it can be the effort of the ego—that is, the pinch the ego feels when it must choose a thing less thrilling or immediately gratifying—when it must exert to clear an opening of time, or perhaps to muster enough patience to enable its person (so to speak) to sit still long enough to appreciate a setting sun or to properly observe (like Whitman would) a spear of summer grass.
What Huberman is calling effort, mythologists call sacrifice. But keep in mind that Huberman is employing the best term he can to describe what it is and what it takes to sustain a balanced relationship between the cost (replenishing the dopamine baseline) and the reward (enjoying the dopamine). In depth psychology, when we speak of balance we often speak also of the tension of the opposites which are held in balance, and we also acknowledge the responsibility of the individual to provide the energy to hold them. I believe Huberman’s effort intuits not only the sacrifice that must be made, but also the presence of the “tension” that indicates a balance is in holding in the first place.
Also of importance, these dynamics of dopamine functioning show that nature has already set it up (indeed, has wired it into our brains) that if we want to feel good and live well, we must regularly engage in sacrifice.
If we want to feel good and live well, we must regularly engage in sacrifice.
Pursuing the possibility curve: inviting sacrifice
I thought [to myself] "…but I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang on to rapture, and that will bring me both my consciousness and my being." I think it worked.
Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth, 120)
I feel fortunate when I look back upon the rapturous, ruinous history of my youth, replete with all the psychological trainwrecks and self-induced disasters prompted by a seemingly endless spate of asinine choices.
I also feel fortunate because I indeed did pursue my bliss (which Campbell is addressing in terms of “rapture” in the above quote). And I like the quote because the question of what bliss is does not get watered down into some abstract definition. Instead, he provides a simple, common-sense formula that says: You know what you like or what calls you, so just hold on to that. It’s kind of like saying you don’t have to know what a glass of milk is, or how to define it, to drink it. Just drink the damn milk. Well, my version of milk was exploring, and my methods were as reckless and passionate as they were open and sincere.
But now that I’m approaching my 60s and the spark of let’s-just-do-it-and-see-what-happens has pretty much been clobbered out of me, I have the luxury and disposition of reflecting: central to all the mayhem, I believe, was the drive to explore (which involved a lot of “testing” of reality). I suppose it all involved a desire for possibilities that were significantly different from the ones the universe kept offering.
So, I engaged in what (in recent years) I’ve come to call the possibility curve: a notion which I had unconsciously formed and pitted against the immensely more popular and dependable probability curve. What made the possibility curve exhilarating was getting to be far out on the margins where certainty was least and chance greatest, where the likelihood of an act rendering a favorable result was absurdly low. But under these conditions, a uniqueness or specialness was ceded to those few occasions in which favorable results did come through, soaked with intimacy and meaning. It was as if they’d beaten all imaginable odds to get here. Anyway, these rare occasions were the paydays, while the rest of the time involved a lot of losing.
But losing was not a loss. Rather it was excellent training in getting familiar with sacrifice. “But these were consequences,” you may say. Yes, but who’s to say that consequence and sacrifice are not just two sides of the same coin, where consequence follows, while sacrifice precedes, an event? And where consequence is sent from “out there” while sacrifice emerges from “in here”? And what if our notion of sacrifice can be described as consequence-in-advance? Etymologically speaking, “consequence” does not indicate a linear timeline of cause and effect. Rather it means the “uniting” of sequence.
I bring this up because I’m suspecting/guessing/intuiting there’s a concurrence-value to this relationship between sacrifice and bliss—neither the credit card of consequence nor the up-front-in-cash of the sacrifice. More precisely, I’m thinking of those kinds of sacrifice that are enacted while the reward is being reaped, like a bicyclist locked into an uphill slope, his lungs gasping for air, his thighs burning, and yet these very sensations thrill and fulfill him. Or the fulfillment that accompanies the egoic effort it takes to watch a sunset or (again) observe a spear of summer grass.
In short, there’s something about all this stuff that feels like it needs to be mixed into one moment, pulsating, resonating like a frequency of vibration that hums through the body and psyche, the kind one feels when they are in stride with their dharma (i.e., their calling) because they have taken full responsibility for their individuation. In so doing, they reap the rewards of their condition because they are simultaneously making the sacrifice of bearing that responsibility. All this, I am guessing, is getting nearer in definition to what bliss is, on levels beyond mere pleasure or reward.
The sacrifice that is not offered is imposed
Neurosis is always a substitute for legitimate suffering
C. G. Jung (from Psychology and Religion: West and East, CW 11, para. 129)
To conclude the concept of sacrifice and consequence as two sides of the same coin, here is an exceptionally apt depth-psychological context. It’s important to point out that “neurosis” is a neutral term that simply indicates an incompatibility between one’s ego and their unconscious—in other words, neurosis is a condition that affects all human beings in various forms and degrees. And so, relevant to us all. Regarding the above quote, the neurotic symptoms are the sacrifices that are imposed (cf. consequences) upon those who do not pay attention to the correlating complex. Or another way to put it, neurotic symptoms are the collection-agents of the unconscious.
Jolande Jacobi provides what I consider a priceless formula by which one can direct the energy of neurosis into individuation. She writes of neurosis that something in us “knows full well that no complex can be resolved unless one faces the conflict that causes it, and this requires courage, strength, and an ego that is capable of suffering" (Complex, Archetype, Symbol in the Psychology of C. G. Jung, 18). Let me repeat that last part … and an ego that is capable of suffering. For that is the payload. Huberman would approve, as Jacobi’s suffering correlates nicely with his effort.
And, let me leave you with this final thought as a possibility: bliss as a unified phenomenon, as the simultaneity or dynamic synergy of sacrifice and reward, as a fluid concurrence of opposites in which the suffering—and effort—aspects neither hinder nor hurt (precisely because they complement and, indeed, complete the reward). And for some rather inexplicable, paradoxical reason, this delights.
MythBlast authored by:
Craig Deininger has been a regularly featured writer for the JCF since 2018. He has taught at many institutions including Naropa University, Studio Film School in Los Angeles, and the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where he earned an MFA in Poetry. He also earned an MA and PhD in Mythology and Jungian Psychology from Pacifica Graduate Institute in California. He has balanced his scholarship with a long history of (what he calls) "fieldwork," ranging from commercial fishing in Alaska, building trail for the Forest Service in the Rockies, commercial farming in the midwest, years of construction and landscaping across the country and, of course, countless outdoor misadventures in backpacking, rockclimbing, mountain biking, and the like. He ranks himself in the top 99% of the world population in the art of digging a hole with a shovel and acknowledges his inflation for thinking this. His poetry has appeared in several literary magazines including The Iowa Review, and his first book of poetry Leaves from the World Tree, was co-authored with mythologist Dennis Slattery and published by Mandorla Books.
This MythBlast was inspired by The Power of Myth Episode 4, and Myth and Meaning
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In this bonus episode recorded in 1957 at The Cooper Union in New York, Joseph Campbell speaks about the similarities and differences in "Eastern" and "Western" mythologies and ways of thinking.
This Week's Highlights
"The basic myth is of an earthly paradise, like the Garden of Eden, where there is no distinction between male and female, between men and animals, and no movement in time. Then a killing takes place, the bodies are planted, and out of that come the food plants. So begetting and death come together. You see in some ritual sacrifices the repetition of that original mythological act: you go back to the beginning and get a renewal of energy."
-- Joseph Campbell
Myth and Meaning, 39