Myths to Live By

by Joseph Campbell

  Fig. 12.3 — The Doors of Perception

  That is the sense, also, of the saying of the poet William Blake: “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite.”8 And I think that I recognize the same sense in the lines of Whitman that I have just cited, as well as in those of the Indian Upaniṣad, the Egyptian Book of the Dead, and the Gnostic Thomas Gospel.

  “The symbols of the higher religions may at first sight seem to have little in common,” wrote a Roman Catholic monk, the late Father Thomas Merton, in a brief but perspicacious article entitled “Symbolism: Communication or Communion?”9

  But when one comes to a better understanding of those religions, and when one sees that the experiences which are the fulfillment of religious belief and practice are most clearly expressed in symbols, one may come to recognize that often the symbols of different religions may have more in common than have the abstractly formulated official doctrines....

  The true symbol [he states again] does not merely point to something else. It contains in itself a structure which awakens our consciousness to a new awareness of the inner meaning of life and of reality itself. 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 affectively and consciously into contact with his own deepest self, with other men, and with God.... ‘God is dead’... means, in fact, that symbols are dead.10

  The poet and the mystic regard the imagery of a revelation as a fiction through which an insight into the depths of being—one’s own being and being generally — is conveyed anagogically. Sectarian theologians, on the other hand, hold hard to the literal readings of their narratives, and these hold traditions apart. The lives of three incarnations, Jesus, Kṛṣṇa, and Śākyamuni, will not be the same, yet as symbols pointing not to themselves, or to each other, but to the life beholding them, they are equivalent. To quote the monk Thomas Merton again: “One cannot apprehend a symbol unless one is able to awaken, in one’s own being, the spiritual resonances which respond to the symbol not only as sign but as ‘sacrament’ and ‘presence.’ The symbol is an object pointing to a subject. We are summoned to a deeper spiritual awareness, far beyond the level of subject and object.”11

  Mythologies, in other words, mythologies and religions, are great poems and, when recognized as such, point infallibly through things and events to the ubiquity of a “presence” or “eternity” that is whole and entire in each. In this function all mythologies, all great poetries, and all mystic traditions are in accord; and where any such inspiriting vision remains effective in a civilization, everything and every creature within its range is alive. The first condition, therefore, that any mythology must fulfill if it is to render life to modern lives is that of cleansing the doors of perception to the wonder, at once terrible and fascinating, of ourselves and of the universe of which we are the ears and eyes and the mind. Whereas theologians, reading their revelations counterclockwise, so to say, point to references in the past (in Merton’s words: “to another point on the circumference”) and Utopians offer revelations only promissory of some desired future, mythologies, having sprung from the psyche, point back to the psyche (”the center”): and anyone seriously turning within will, in fact, rediscover their references in himself.

  Some weeks ago I received in the mail from the psychiatrist directing research at the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center in Baltimore, Dr. Stanislav Grof, the manuscript of an impressive work interpreting the results of his practice during the past fourteen years (first in Czechoslovakia and now in this country) of psycholytic therapy; that is to say, the treatment of nervous disorders, both neurotic and psychotic, with the aid of judiciously measured doses of LSD. And I have found so much of my thinking about mythic forms freshly illuminated by the findings here reported, that I am going to try in these last pages to render a suggestion of the types and depths of consciousness that Dr. Grof has fathomed in his searching of our inward sea.12

  Very briefly, the first order of induced experience that Dr. Grof reports upon, he has termed the “Aesthetic LSD Experience.” In the main this corresponds to that which Aldous Huxley, in The Doors of Perception, described back in 1954, after he had swallowed and experienced the effects of four-tenths of a gram of mescalin. What is here experienced is such an astounding vivification, alteration and intensification, of all experiences of the senses that, as Huxley remarked, even a common garden chair in the sun is recognized as “inexpressibly wonderful, wonderful to the point, almost, of being terrifying.”13 Other, more profound effects may yield sensations of physical transformation, lightness, levitation, clairvoyance, or even the power to assume animal forms and the like, such as primitive shamans claim. In India such powers (called siddhi ) are claimed by yogis, and are not supposed to have accrued to them from without, but to have arisen from within, awakened by their mystic training, being potential within us all. Aldous Huxley had a similar thought, which he formulated in Western terms, and of which I expect to have something to say a bit later on.

  The second type of reaction, Dr. Grof has described as the “Psychodynamic LSD Experience,” relating it to an extension of consciousness into what Jung termed the Personal Unconscious, and the activation there of those emotionally overloaded contents that are dealt with typically in a Freudian psychoanalysis. The grim tensions and terrified resistances to conscious scrutiny that are encountered on this level derive from various unconscious strains of moral, social, and prideful infantile ego-defenses, inappropriate to adulthood; and the mythological themes that in psychoanalytical literature have been professionally associated with the conflicts of these sessions—Oedipus complex, Electra complex, etc.—are not really (in their references here) mythological at all. They bear, in the context of these infantile biographical associations, no anagogical, transpersonal relevancy whatsoever, but are allegorical merely of childhood desires frustrated by actual or imagined parental prohibitions and threats. Furthermore, even when traditional mythological figures do appear in the fantasies of this Freudian stage, they will be allegorical merely of personal conflicts; most frequently, as Dr. Grof has observed, “the conflict between sexual feelings or activities and the religious taboos, as well as primitive fantasies about devils and hell or angels and heaven, related to narratives or threats and promises of adults.” And it will be only when these personal “psychodynamic” materials will have been actively relived, along with their associated emotional, sensory, and ideational features, that the psychological “knot points” of the Personal Unconscious will have been sufficiently resolved for the deeper, inward, downward journey to proceed from personal-biographical to properly transpersonal (first biological, then metaphysical-mystical) realizations.

  What Dr. Grof has observed is that, very much as patients during a Freudian psychoanalysis and in the “psychodynamic” stages of a psycholytic treatment “relive” the basal fixations (and thereby break the hold upon them) of their unconsciously rooted affect and behavior patterns, so, in leaving this personal memory field behind, they begin to manifest both psychologically and physically the symptomatology of a totally different order of relived experiences; those, namely, of the agony of actual birth: the moment (indeed, the hours) of passive, helpless terror when the uterine contractions suddenly began, and continued, and continued, and continued; or the more active tortures of the second stage of delivery, when the cervix opened and propulsion through the birth canal commenced—continuing with an unremitting intensification of sheer fright and total agony, to a climax amounting practically to an experience of annihilation; when suddenly, release, light! the sharp pain of umbilical severance, suffocation until the bloodstream finds its new route to the lungs, and then, breath and breathing, on one’s own! “The patients,” states Dr. Grof, “spent hours in agonizing pain, gasping for breath, with the color of their faces changing from dead pale to dark purple. They were rolling on the floor and discharging extreme tensions in muscular tremors, twit
ches and complex twisting movements. The pulse rate was frequently doubled, and it was threadlike; there was often nausea with occasional vomiting and excessive sweating.

  “Subjectively,” he continues, “these experiences were of a transpersonal nature—they had a much broader framework than the body and lifespan of a single individual. The experiencers were identifying with many individuals or groups of individuals at the same time; in the extreme the identification involved all suffering mankind, past, present and future.” “The phenomena observed here,” he states again, “are of a much more fundamental nature and have different dimensions than those of the Freudian stage.” They are, in fact, of a mythological transpersonal order, not distorted to refer (as in the Freudian field) to the accidents of an individual life, but opening outward, as well as inward, to what James Joyce termed “the grave and constant in human sufferings.”14

  For example, when reliving in the course of psycholytic treatment the nightmare of the first stage of the birth trauma—when the uterine contractions commence and the locked-in child, in sudden fright and pain, is awakened to a consciousness of itself in danger—the utterly terrified subject is overwhelmed by an acute experience of the very ground of being as anguished. Fantasies of inquisitorial torture come to mind, metaphysical anguish and existential despair: an identification with Christ crucified (”My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?”15), Prometheus bound to the mountain crag, or Ixion to his whirling wheel. The mythic mode is of the Buddha’s “All life is sorrowful”: born in fear and pain, expiring in fear and pain, with little but fear and pain between. “Vanity of vanities, [...] all is vanity.”16 The question of “meaning” here becomes obsessive, and if the LSD session terminates on this note, there will generally remain a sense of life as loathsome, meaningless, a hateful, joyless inferno, with no way out either in space or in time, “no exit”—except possibly by suicide, which, if chosen, will be of the passive, quietly helpless kind, by drowning, an overdose of sleeping pills, or the like.

  Fig. 12.4 — Bacchae Tearing Pentheus

  Passing to an intensive reliving of the second stage of the birth trauma, on the other hand—that of the tortured struggle in the birth canal—the mood and the imagery become violent, not passive but active suffering being the dominant experience here, with elements of aggression and sadomasochistic passion: illusions of horrendous battles, struggles with prodigious monsters, overwhelming tides and waters, wrathful gods, rites of terrible sacrifice, sexual orgies, judgment scenes, and so on. The subject identifies himself simultaneously with both the victims and the aggressive forces of such conflicts, and as the intensity of the general agony mounts, it approaches and finally breaks beyond the pain threshold in an excruciating crisis of what Dr. Grof has aptly named “volcanic ecstasy.” Here all extremes of pain and pleasure, joy and terror, murderous aggression and passionate love are united and transcended. The relevant mythic imagery is of religions reveling in suffering, guilt, and sacrifice: visions of the wrath of God, the universal Deluge, Sodom and Gomorrah, Moses and the Decalogue, Christ’s Via Crucis, Bacchic orgies, terrible Aztec sacrifices, Śiva the Destroyer, Kālī’s gruesome dance of the Burning Ground, and the phallic rites of Cybele.

  Suicides in this Dionysian mood are of the violent type: blowing out one’s brains, leaping from heights, before trains, etc. Or one is moved to meaningless murder. The subject is obsessed with feelings of aggressive tension mixed with anticipation of catastrophe; extremely irritable and with a tendency to provoke conflicts. The world is seen as full of threats and oppression. Carnivals with wild kicks, rough parties with promiscuous sex, alcoholic orgies and bacchanalian dances, violence of all kinds, vertiginous adventures and explosions mark the life styles struck with the ferocity of this stage of the birth experience. In the course of a therapeutic session a regression to this level may be carried to culmination in an utterly terrifying crisis of actual ego-death, complete annihilation on all levels, followed by a grandiose, expansive sense of release, rebirth, and redemption, with enormous feelings and experiences of decompression, expansion of space, and blinding, radiant light: visions of heavenly blue and gold, columned gigantic halls with crystal chandeliers, peacock-feather fantasies, rainbow spectrums, and the like. The subjects, feeling cleansed and purged, are moved now by an overwhelming love for all mankind, a new appreciation of the arts and of natural beauties, great zest for life, and a forgiving, wonderfully reconciled and expansive sense of God in his heaven and all right with the world.

  Dr. Grof has found (and this I find extremely interesting) that the differing imageries of the various world religions tend to appear and to support his patients variously during the successive stages of their sessions. In immediate association with the relived agonies of the birth trauma, the usual imagery brought to mind is of the Old and New Testaments, together with (occasionally) certain Greek, Egyptian, or other pagan counterparts. However, when the agony has been accomplished and the release experienced of “birth”—actually, a “second” or “spiritual” birth, released from the unconscious fears of the former, “once born” personal condition—the symbology radically changes. Instead of mainly Biblical, Greek, and Christian themes, the analogies now point rather toward the great Orient, chiefly India. “The source of these experiences,” states Dr. Grof, “is obscure, and their resemblance to the Indian descriptions flabbergasting.” He likens their tone to that of the timeless intrauterine state before the onset of delivery: a blissful, peaceful, contentless condition, with deep, positive feelings of joy, love, and accord, or even union with the Universe and/or God. Paradoxically, this ineffable state is at once contentless and all-containing, of nonbeing yet more than being, no ego and yet an extension of self that embraces the whole cosmos. And here I think of that passage in Aldous Huxley’s The Doors of Perception where he describes the sense that he experienced in his first mescalin adventure of his mind opening to ranges of wonder such as he had never before even imagined.

  Reflecting on my experience [Huxley wrote], I find myself agreeing with the eminent Cambridge philosopher, Dr. C. D. Broad, “that we should do well to consider much more seriously than we have hitherto been inclined to do the type of theory which Bergson put forward in connection with memory and sense perception. The suggestion is that the function of the brain and nervous system and sense organs is in the main eliminative and not productive. Each person is at each moment capable of remembering all that has ever happened to him and of perceiving everything that is happening everywhere in the universe. The function of the brain and nervous system is to protect us from being overwhelmed and confused by this mass of largely useless and irrelevant knowledge, by shutting out most of what we should otherwise perceive or remember at any moment, and leaving only that very small and special selection which is likely to be practically useful.”

  According to such a theory, each one of us is potentially Mind at Large. But in so far as we are animals, our business is at all costs to survive. To make biological survival possible, Mind at Large has to be funneled through the reducing valve of the brain and nervous system. What comes out at the other end is a measly trickle of the kind of consciousness which will help us to stay alive on the surface of this particular planet... Most people, most of the time, know only what comes through the reducing valve and is consecrated as genuinely real by the local language. Certain persons, however, seem to be born with a kind of by-pass that circumvents the reducing valve. In others temporary by-passes may be acquired either spontaneously, or as the result of deliberate “spiritual exercises,” or through hypnosis, or by means of drugs. Through these permanent or temporary by-passes there flows, not indeed the perception “of everything that is happening everywhere in the universe” (for the by-pass does not abolish the reducing valve, which still excludes the total content of Mind at Large), but something more than, and above all something different from, the carefully selected utilitarian material which our narrowed, individual minds regard as a complete, or at least suffi
cient, picture of reality.17

  Now it strikes me as evident through all this that the imagery of mythology, stemming as it does from the psyche and reflecting back to the same, represents in its various inflections various stages or degrees of the opening of ego-consciousness toward the prospect of what Aldous Huxley has here called Mind at Large. Plato in the Timaeus declares that “there is only one way in which one being can serve another, and this is by giving him his proper nourishment and motion: and the motions that are akin to the divine principle within us are the thoughts and revolutions of the universe.”18 It is these, I would say, that are represented in myth. As illustrated in the various mythologies of the peoples of the world, however, the universals have been everywhere particularized to the local sociopolitical context. As an old professor of mine in Comparative Religions at the University of Munich used to say: “In its subjective sense the religion of all mankind is one and the same. In its objective sense, however, there are differing forms.”

  In the past, I think we can now say, the differing forms served the differing and often conflicting interests of the various societies, binding individuals to their local group horizons and ideals, whereas in the West today we have learned to recognize a distinction between the spheres and functions, on one hand, of society, practical survival, economic and political ends, and, on the other hand, sheerly psychological (or, as we used to say, spiritual) values. To return to the name, once more, of Dante: there is in the Fourth Treatise of the Convito a passage in which he discourses on the divinely ordained separation of state and Church, as symbolized historically in the joined yet separate histories of Rome and Jerusalem, the Empire and the Papacy. These are the two arms of God, not to be confused; and he rebukes the Papacy for its political interventions, the authority of the Church being properly “not of this world” but of the Spirit—the relationship of which to the aims of this world is exactly that of Huxley’s Mind at Large to the utilitarian ends of biological survival—which are all right and necessary too, but are not the same.