A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell)

by Joseph Campbell

  we serve society—engagement.

  The second half of life

  we turn inward—disengagement.

  She is the same person, the same river, all the time. Joyce makes it so you can feel the old woman in the little girl and the little girl in the old woman. It's marvelous. And it’s the way you actually feel as you get older, if you are paying attention to the experiences you’re having inside.

  You know, they say that old people can’t remember what happened yesterday, but they can remember with great vividness what happened fifty years ago. This is really true. In old age, you are relaxed from the immediate occasion of the day’s summons, and you’re sinking down into your memory system, which is as alive as can be. Moments with your parents that were crisis moments are right there with you. They become important. They’re determinate moments that help illuminate what the relationship was.

  Sometimes when I look back, I think, “Son of a gun, you missed everything.” It’s funny how, at a certain age, all I could see were the negatives in the way I lived: I missed it that time, or another time I was a stupid boob. Now, I try not to think about it. I’m wanting to get to heaven, where they tell me that you don’t remember all those things.

  In the age of decrepitude,

  you look back over your life

  with gratitude,

  and forward to death

  as a return home.

  When Dante passed out of Purgatory, he drank at the river where all of his sins were wiped out of his memory. The first river from which he’d drunk forgave all of his sins, but that wasn’t good enough, because then he still had to forget them.

  In Hinduism, the religion of the god Viṣṇu is that of love. In the Viṣṇu way of analyzing love, there are five degrees of love and a model that represents each of these different stages. The whole discipline of seeking and achieving illumination can be conducted from the energy of this channel.

  The first degree of love, that of servant to master, is a low degree of love: “Oh Lord, you are the master. I am the servant. Tell me what I am to do, and I shall do it.” This is the way of the religion of law, where there are a lot of commands—ten commandments, a thousand commandments, a hundred and ten thousand commandments. It is a religion of fear. You have not awakened to the divine presence. It’s out there, and you are here. This way is principally for people who have not had much time to devote themselves either to religious thinking or to love.

  The model that represents this first stage is that of the little monkey king, Hanumān, who is the servant of Rāma. I don't know whether there is a specific example of this stage in the Christian tradition, but there doesn’t have to be, because the Christian tradition is nothing else for most people: obeying ten commandments here, ten commandments there.

  Degree number two, the relationship of friend to friend, is the awakening of what we would call love. Here, one thinks of one's friend more than in the first situation. The model of this second stage of love, friend for friend, would be that of the apostles to Jesus, or of anyone who really is a lover of anything or anybody.

  Sri Ramakrishna, a wonderful Hindu saint of the last century, once asked a woman who said she did not love God, “Is there nothing in the world that you do love?” And she answered, “I love my little nephew.” “Well then,” he replied, “There He is. Your service is there.” Whenever there is an experience of love as a spontaneous act, rather than as the following of a command, you have moved out of stage one and into stage two.

  This is worth thinking about. How much religious service reaches that level? I’d say very little. Yet this is how it ought to be. Religious experience is greatly lowered when it’s only a fulfillment of laws and commands, and you are but a willing or non-willing person doing or not doing as you are told. When it comes to a spontaneous relationship of love, you’re in another category.

  The third order of love is that of parent for child. It is a more intimate and intense affair than that of friend to friend. The image of this third order of love in the Christian system is the Christmas crib, in which the babe represents the coming to us of the Christ in our own hearts. This is symbolic of the awakening in your heart of the realization that the divine power is within you. It’s the dawn of the true religious life. You are fostering the spiritual child within yourself. The model for this stage in the Hindu tradition is the love of the Gopis for the little boy Kṛṣṇa, the naughty butter thief.

  There’s one very amusing Kṛṣṇa episode, in which his foster mother is told that her little boy is out-side eating mud. She goes out to clean the mud out of his mouth, and when he opens his mouth, he reveals to her all the heavens and hells and gods and demons in himself. She is , of course, stunned by this display, and her relationship to him would be pretty well damaged from then on if she remembered it, so he very kindly erases it from her memory. How we know that this event happened—since she was the only one who had the experience and then she forgot it—I do not know. But that’s the way religious things are.

  The fourth level of love is that of spouse to spouse, and here there is the business of the androgyne, of identification with the Other. You have found the god in your heart, and now the god is found in this intimate and most enduring kind of relationship. That’s why marriage is regarded, in such traditions, as a permanent affair. There is only one chance to have this type of experience. Nuns wear a wedding ring, because they are brides of Christ. Their relationship is to this invisible spouse, which, on the spiritual level, is good enough.

  Then we come to the highest order of love, the fifth, and that is compulsive, uncontrollable, illicit love, where there is nothing but love and you are totally ripped out of yourself in relation to God. You are le fou, the crazed one who’s gone mad with love.

  In courtly love,

  the man goes crazy, not the woman.

  When the man’s been moved like this,

  he is capable of incredible feats,

  but he’s on a narrow path.

  When you follow your passion,

  society’s help is gone.

  You must be very careful.

  You’re completely on your own.

  In marriage, one is still harmoniously related to society and to the neighborhood, but with this fifth stage of love, everything except love drops away, and there is just a one-pointed attachment to the other. All else is forgotten, and nothing else matters. I am sure some of you have had this experience. If you haven’t, it’s too bad.

  In this little scale that the Hindus give—first servant to master; second, friend to friend; third, parent to child; fourth, spouse to spouse; and then fifth, just this total love—one is always in danger of over-valuing the sheer love experience. You feel that you are losing something if you pull the experience down, but you have got to pull it down. All you have to do, really, is know what the possible relationship can be.

  If you’re already married and this rapturous experience happens, then you’re not going to have a marriage, because you’ve got to have some other kind of relation-ship to the person. The way to pull down the sheer love experience is to take very deep pleasure of some kind in the concrete aspects of the relationship that you are establishing. Sheer rapture has no relationship to life, but there are relationships in life which also have value. Begin to cultivate those, and this total rapture can be pulled down and not lost. It’s not necessarily lost. And this is the trick in marriage.

  There are lots of joyful experiences in marriage that have nothing to do with total rapture, but these experiences absorb that energy system and make it possible for one to stay married and not think it’s only about taking out the garbage. Anyone who gets married is going to have problems with daily chores, because the problem of a household is on you whether you are a male or a female. But you can make wonderful little ritual experiences out of the things that have to be done, and life can ride beautifully on these events. I think it is a failure to accept the tangibilities of two people living together that
makes marriages break up.

  Marriage is not a love affair,

  it’s an ordeal.

  It is a religious exercise, a sacrament,

  the grace of participating in another life.

  There is another kind of breakup that takes place late in marriage, and this one just baffles me: people who break up when the kids are out of the house and launched. I have seen this happen in five or six cases to people whom I never would have thought would have had that happen. They are well on in their fifties, they have been living together, they’ve brought up a family together, had life together, and it goes to pot. The only thing holding them together had been the children.

  This is the failure of what I called the alchemical marriage. They have had a biological marriage, but there has been no realization of the interlocking of the psyches and the mutual education that comes out of that acquiescence and relationship. It’s a damned shame that there has been no preliminary notion of what the possibilities are of that second half of life.

  If you go into marriage with a program,

  you will find that it won’t work.

  Successful marriage

  is leading innovative lives together,

  being open, non-programmed.

  It’s a free fall: how you handle

  each new thing as it comes along.

  As a drop of oil on the sea,

  you must float,

  using intellect and compassion

  to ride the waves.

  It seems to me, you have to think of significant things to do together that require both of you. The medieval idea of the gentle heart is very much a part of this. If what you’ve been calling love is really lust, that is a state alright: one that can die. Love doesn’t die.

  For the gentle heart,

  marriage must first be spiritual,

  then comes physical consummation.

  It's hard to talk about anything as sensitive as this, but that term “gentle heart” to me is a clue to what love is. The idea of the gentle heart involves a sense of responsibility to the person. If that is not there, you have not got love, you’ve got something else. If that is there, it will last. Lust doesn’t, no responsibility there. In marriages that go when the children go, the parents’ sense of responsibility was to the children, not to each other, and when that was gone, the link was gone.

  Before there are any children or even before there is a marriage, the crucial question is: “Is this the gentle heart?” Is the person seeking a possession? Or is the person feeling a responsibility to the one with whom the relationship is taking place? If there is feeling of responsibility, then I think you are in danger.

  What I am saying is, not that responsibility constitutes love, but that love without a sense of responsibility is not love. It’s taking possession. Are you trying to possess somebody? Or are you in a relationship?

  Talking about what one has done in one’s own life, I wouldn’t have thought of marrying anyone unless, in committing myself to the marriage, I understood that I was taking that person’s life in my hands. I can’t under-stand that other feeling of possessing somebody. It is a failure to take responsibility for what the hell you are doing. One can have love affairs and all the weeping that goes on in all that, but that is very different from moving into a marriage.

  In the first place, you have to know what you are doing. I think a lot of people don’t know what they are doing, and they don’t know what they’re doing to that other person. If you don’t have the maturity to control your compulsive passions, it seems to me that you are ineligible for marriage. I think what I am saying probably comes from my Catholic upbringing. In Catholicism, marriage is a destiny decision.

  Beyond that, there was an omen in our marriage. I had a little twenty-dollar-a-year house in Woodstock, on a road called Maverick Road. We were driving up there for our honeymoon, and as we approached that road, a hearse came from the other side and drove before us. I had never seen a hearse in that neighborhood, and I read the omen as meaning we would be together until death. There it was.

  What I see in marriage, then, is a real identification with that other person as your responsibility, and as the one whom you love. Committing yourself to anyone, turning your destiny over to a dual destiny, is a life commitment. To lose your sense of responsibility to the person who has given you that commitment because something comes along that enables you to think, “I'd like to fly off in this direction and forget that which has already been committed”—this is not marriage. I do not think you are married unless your relationship to your spouse has primary consideration in your life. It’s got to be top.

  Compulsive erotic relationships can break in on this. One is not in perfect control of oneself. I don’t mean that everything outside of the marriage is lust. It can be love also. When you cut off a love that comes to you outside of marriage, you have cut off a part of yourself in the marriage.

  But then you have the problem of relating with responsibility to that love affair and to the marriage that you’ve already got as your prime relationship, and that is not an easy thing to do. You have to develop a number of different ways of relating to people, not just one. Sometimes, if there is a mutual sense of the nature of the relationship and its value, then something can be worked out; but I would understand that, no matter what happened, the marriage would have to come back together again. It’s prime. It’s number one.

  If the marriage is toxic, you have to decide whether there is a possibility of transforming the situation. If you feel that there can be a transformation, then you can go through the ordeal of effecting one. You can exert the necessary energy on the other to effect the transformation. That is to say, you can, as a kind of personal discipline, increase the atmosphere of love and confidence and cooperation. On the other hand, if your life is threatened, or even your love of life, and the situation cannot be transformed or you don’t think it is worth the commitment, then you have got to clear out.

  All of this depends, of course, on the individual case and one’s own judgment. There are no basic rules that can be applied right across the board because the conflict situation differs in intensity and in character from case to case.

  When I was a student in Germany, an old German professor said that the way to choose a wife is to look at her mother. If the mother is a good woman and the kind that you regard as ideal, then marry any one of her daughters, and she will shape a life for you.

  In marriage,

  the woman is the initiator,

  and the man rides along.

  That idea of the wife being the one that shapes a life for you is one that I took to heart, and it's a good idea. The woman is the energy, the śakti, of life. The male must learn to ride on that energy and not dictate the life. I'm certain of that. He is the vehicle of the woman's energy. That’s what he is. When the male won’t disintegrate, you do not have a marriage. You have a living-together, perhaps, for practical or erotic reasons, but a marriage requires the dissolution of the male initiative.

  Marriage can’t work without

  a psychological guiding of both people.

  There must be disintegration of ego

  for the two to combine.

  The uniting process involves

  fermentation, amalgamation, disintegration, and putrefaction

  in their psyches.

  When I married Jean, I felt it was a crucifixion. The bridegroom does go to the bride as to the cross. The bride gives herself equally. It’s a reciprocal crucifixion.

  In marriage

  you are not sacrificing yourself

  to the other person.

  You are sacrificing yourself

  to the relationship.

  That’s the problem with getting married. You must ask yourself, “Can I open myself to compassion?” Not to lust, but to compassion. I don’t mean you have to have unconditional love. Committing yourself to a person unconditionally is very different from having unconditional love for everybody in New York City. I�
��m not the Dalai Lama, who’s suppose to have unconditional love for everything in the world. Even God doesn’t have unconditional love. He throws people into hell. I personally don’t even think that unconditional love is an ideal. I think you’ve got to have a discriminating faculty and let bastards be bastards and let those that ought to be hit in the jaw get it. In fact, I have a list. If anybody has a working guillotine, I’d be glad to give them my list.

  When I look

  in the faces of my enemies,

  it makes me proud.

  I think perhaps unconditional love is the Grail. The Grail is between God and the Devil, and it does not judge the way God judges. It goes past God—a pretty big picture. Love, which is unconditional in marriage, is specific; it is focused. It is for that person and not for somebody else. Unconditional love goes right through everything, and it’s a breakthrough in spiritual life. Do not look for it outside of yourself. The only place to look for it is inside. If it is going to be unconditional love, what’s out there doesn’t matter.