A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

by Joseph Campbell

  But gagging on the true doctrine, he’s nevertheless getting it into his blood, into his nerves; it’s his proper food. It touches his proper nature. Spontaneously, he gives a tiger stretch, the first one. A little tiger roar comes out—Tiger Roar 101. The big one says, “There. Now you’ve got it. Now we go into the forest and eat tiger food.”

  Vegetarianism

  is the first turning away from life,

  because life lives on lives.

  Vegetarians are just eating

  something that can’t run away.

  Now, of course, the moral is that we are all tigers living here as goats. The right hand path, the sociological department, is interested in cultivating our goat-nature. Mythology, properly understood as metaphor, will guide you to the recognition of your tiger face. But then how are you going to live with these goats?

  Well, Jesus had something to say about this problem. In Matthew 7 he said, “Do not cast your pearls before swine, or they will trample them under their feet and turn and tear you.”

  The function

  of the orthodox community

  is to torture the mystic to death:

  his goal.

  You wear the outer garment of the law, behave as everyone else and wear the inner garment of the mystic way. Jesus also said that when you pray, you should go into your own room and close the door. When you go out, brush your hair. Don’t let them know. Otherwise, you’ll be a kook, something phony.

  So that has to do with not letting people know where you are. But then comes the second problem: how do you live with these people? Do you know the answer? You know that they are all tigers. And you live with that aspect of their nature, and perhaps in your art you can let them know that they are tigers.

  And that’s the revelation then. And so this brings us to the final formula of the Bodhisattava way, the way of the one who is grounded in eternity and moving in the field of time. The field of time is the field of sorrow. “All life is sorrowful.” And it is. If you try to correct the sorrows, all you do is shift them somewhere else. Life is sorrowful. How do you live with that? You realize the eternal within yourself. You disengage, and yet, reengage. You—and here’s the beautiful formula—“participate with joy in the sorrows of the world.” You play the game. It hurts, but you know that you have found the place that is transcendent of injury and fulfillments. You are there, and that’s it.

  I haven’t kept up with psychology since the death of Jung, but I’d say that Jung was such a person: one grounded in eternity and moving in the field of time. Jean and I had tea for an hour-and-a-half with Dr. and Mrs. Jung at Bollingen, his place at Lake Zurich. It was a lovely occasion. Since he was editing some of the German posthuma of Zimmer and I had done my work on the English, we had no trouble saying hello and enjoying things together without any anxiety of understanding. When we were about to leave Jung said, “So, you’re going to India. Well, let me tell you the meaning of OM.

  “When I was in Africa a group of us went for a little hike. Presently, we knew we were lost. Then we looked around and saw all these boys with things in their noses, standing on one leg, supporting themselves with spears. Nobody knew how to talk to anybody else. We had no knowledge of their language. It was a tense moment. We all just sat down and kept looking at each other. When everybody felt that everything was okay—”it’s okay, these are good people, they’re perfectly okay”—what do I hear? ‘OM…OM…OM…’

  “Then, the next year I was in India with a group of scientists, and if there’s one variety of the human species that is not susceptible to awe, this is it. We went up to Darjeeling, to Tiger Hill, which is a wonderful experience. You are awakened early in the morning about a half hour before sunrise and driven in the chilly morning air to a lofty ridge. And it’s dark. When the sun rises, you see before you millions of square miles of Himalayan peaks breaking into rainbow colors. What did I hear from the scientists? ’OM…OM…OM…’ OM is the sound nature makes when it’s pleased with itself.”

  That’s an example of the kind of playful conversa-tion that we had. He was a beautiful man, and Jean said that he had beautiful eyes.

  Jung found out in 1909 that myth and dream were linked, but it has been well known in India forever. It is implicit in the syllable OM, or A-U-M.

  According to the Māṇḍūkya Upaniṣad, the world of the state of waking consciousness is to be identified with the letter A of the syllable AUM; that of dream consciousness (heaven and hell, that is to say) with the letter U; and deep sleep (the state of the mystical union of the knower and the known, God and his world, brooding the seeds and energies of creation: which is the state symbolized in the center of the mandala) with M.65 The soul is to be propelled both by and from this syllable AUM into the silence beyond and all around it: the silence out of which it rises and back into which it goes when pronounced—slowly and rhythmically …as AUM—AUM—AUM.66

  If you want to hear AUM, just cover your ears and you’ll hear it. Of course, what you are hearing is the blood in the capillaries, but it’s AUM: Ah—waking consciousness; ou—dream consciousness; and then, mmm—the realm of deep, dreamless sleep. AUM is the sound of the radiance of God. This is the most mysterious and important thing to understand, but once you get the idea, it’s very simple.

  “The dream is a little hidden door in the innermost secret recesses of the soul, opening into that cosmic night which was psyche long before there was any ego-consciousness, and which will remain psyche no matter how far our ego-consciousness may extend. For all ego-consciousness is isolated: because it separates and discriminates, it knows only particulars, and it sees only what can be related to the ego. Its essence is limitation, even though it reach to the farthest nebulae among the stars. All consciousness separates; but in dreams we put on the likeness of that more universal, truer, more eternal man dwelling in the darkness of primordial night. There he is still the whole, and the whole is in him, indistinguishable from nature and bare of all egohood.

  “It is from these all-uniting depths that the dream arises, be it never so childish, grotesque, or immoral. So flowerlike is it in its candor and veracity that it makes us blush for the deceitfulness of our lives.”—Jung67

  The secret of dreams is that subject and object are the same. The object is self-luminous, fluent in form, multivalent in its meanings. It’s your dream, the manifestation of your will, and yet you are surprised by it. This is the relationship of ego-consciousness to the unconscious. Ego-consciousness has to learn about the unconscious, and dreams are the vocabulary of the unconscious speaking to the conscious mind. Yet, in dreams and in visions, subject and object are the same.

  Dream, vision, God—God is a luminous vision. The image of God is equivalent to the dream vision.

  So your God is an aspect of yourself, just as your dream image is. That’s what is meant by the Hindu saying, nādevo devam arcayet, “by none but a god shall a god be worshiped.” Your god is a manifestation of your own level of consciousness. All of the heavens and all of the hells are within you. This understanding is just taken for granted in India, so we are in the realm of myth.

  Write down your dreams.

  They are your myths.

  Now, this consciousness is unconscious, but the body is conscious; there is consciousness still there. The heart is beating, the blood is running through the body. If you are cold you will pull the blanket up over you; if you are hot you will push the blanket down. I recall a cartoon in a magazine of a husband and wife in bed. He has all the covers over him, and he’s dreaming about watching a hula dancer on a South Sea isle. She’s freezing and thinks of herself in an Eskimo igloo. The body is conscious.

  The point is that consciousness itself is below this level of darkness, beyond dream consciousness. In one of the Upaniṣads there is a saying: “We go into that brahman world every night, but, alas, we are asleep.” The goal of yoga is to go into that realm awake. If you do, you will have arrived at pure, unmitigated, undifferentiated consciousness. Not
consciousness of any thing, because you are not on levels A or U, but consciousness per se. Since all of our words relate either to things or to a relationship of things—whether things of waking or visions of dream—there are no words for this experience. All that can be said about it is silence.

  Silence is the proper vocabulary of this realization. The Buddha is called Shakyamuni. The word muni means “the silent one,” and Shakya is his family name, so he is the silent one of the Shakya clan. This is why Zimmer said that the best things can’t be told—there are no words for this realization. And when you utter words in order to refer the mind to it, the danger is that the words will trap you and you won’t go through. So, for anyone lecturing, there’s a not very comfortable saying: “He who speaks, does not know. He who knows, does not speak.” That’s the final word.

  The point is that this AUM heard in silence informs all things. All things are manifestations of it. Now you are inward turned. The secret to having a spiritual life as you move in the world is to hear the AUM in all things all the time. If you do, everything is transformed. You no longer have to go anywhere to find your fulfillment and achievement and the treasure that you seek. It is here. It is everywhere.

  Clearly the occurrence of such visions over the whole in-habited earth requires no explanation in terms either of racial or of cultural diffusion. The problem is, rather, psychological: of that depth of the unconscious where, to quote the words of C. G. Jung, “man is no longer a distinct indivi-dual, but his mind widens out and merges into the mind of mankind—not the conscious mind, but the unconscious mind of mankind, where we are all the same.”68

  NOW in every human being there is a built-in human instinct system, without which we should not even come to birth. But each of us has also been educated to a specific local culture system.…We are taught to respond to certain signals positively, to others negatively or with fear; and most of these signals taught are not of the natural, but of some local social order. They are socially specific. Yet the impulses that they activate and control are of nature, biology, and instinct.69

  In a mature life you’re hanging onto life, your erotic relationships are in play and established, and you have found a way to maintain yourself. I will give you an example of how these various energies work against each other. There’s one male fish that is normally colored in such a way that the upper part of its body is dark and the lower part is light. That’s the usual coloring of fish, because when you are below looking up into the light, the fish is relatively invisible, and when you are above looking down into the dark, it’s also camouflaged. But when this particular fish is in love, his color shifts so that he’ll be visible. This puts him in danger, you see, and it seems to me symbolic of this love thing. You give up self-protection when this other comes along and you are seized with erotic compulsion.

  It’s a very amusing exchange. When the female fish goes by, a dance takes place. There is something about his coloration that makes her give a little move, and then that move triggers his response. If any one of the little moves is missed, the dance ends and that choreography is finished. But if they can go through the whole choreography, then something happens.

  There was a beautiful movie of three whales: two bulls and a cow. A little job of nature was going to be done for the cow. She was ready. It was one of the most impressive and moving things to see the cooperation of these three animals. They were swimming, the three of them plowing along, and when she was ready to receive one of them, she slowed down. The one on the right was supporting her and, my god, like a rainbow this penis comes curving over the body of this enormous animals. It was very moving and awesome.

  When animals get involved with something that comes pushing from inside like that, there are elaborate ritual relationships. One can say that ritual gets going when the species principle begins operating in individuals. It is a commitment of the individual to whatever might be the intention of nature or the society given the circumstances. But how is it that the second bull, who is not involved in the act itself, can participate in this? This to me is something way out. There was absolutely no sense of competition. This was cooperation. I’ve heard that now that boats are taking out tourists to look at the whales, the whales are moving out beyond Catalina Island. The crowds can ruin anything.

  I was watching a flock of birds the other day. The rhythm of their flight is something to see. They all seem to know just when they are going to turn, where they are going, and what’s up now. How does this happen? That’s participating in a transpersonal rhythm of some kind.

  I recall once having seen one of those beautiful Disney nature films, of a sea turtle laying her eggs in the sand, some thirty feet or so from the water. A number of days later, out of the sand there came a little multitude of tiny just-born turtles, each about as big as a nickel; and without an instant’s hesitation they all started for the sea. No hunting around. No trial-and-error. No asking, “Now what would be a reasonable place for me to head for first?” Not a single one of those little things went the wrong way, fumbling first into the bushes, and there saying, “Oh!” and turning around, thinking, “I’m made for something better than this!” No, indeed! They went directly as their mother must have known they all would go: mother turtle, or Mother Nature. A flock of seagulls, meanwhile, having screamed the news to each other, came zooming like dive bombers down on those little nickels that were making for the water. The turtles knew perfectly well that that was where they had to get, and they were going as fast as their very little legs could push them: the legs, by the way, already knowing just how to push. No training or experimenting has been necessary. The legs knew what to do, and the little eyes knew that what they were seeing out in front of them was where they were going. The whole system was in perfect operation, with the whole fleet of tiny tanks heading clumsily, yet as fast as they could, for the sea: and then…Well now, one surely would have thought that for such little things those great big waves might have seemed threatening. But no! They went right on into the water and already knew how to swim. And as soon as they were there, of course, the fish began coming at them. Life is tough!70

  The Bushmen in South Africa have very pitiful little bows that don’t have a shooting distance beyond twenty yards or so, but they also have a deadly poison that they put on the points of these little arrows. The Bushmen’s counterpart to the American Indian’s buffalo would be the eland: a big, beautiful type of gazelle. A Bushman has to hypnotize an eland to get close enough to send his arrow. The eland will live for another day in great pain while the poison kills it, and the hunter has to identify himself with the animal and observe certain taboos, and the way he behaves actually influences the death of the animal.

  The Hopi Snake Dance relates to this. It’s a strange and wonderful ritual, where the dancers hold snakes in their mouths and stroke them with feathers as they dance. I saw a film about the snake worshipping, or snake using, people in the mountains of, I think it was, Georgia or Tennessee. These people have ceremonies in which they toss a tangle of rattlesnakes back and forth. The participants believe that if they are “in the Christ” they won’t be bitten. They get themselves into a psychological state that the animals somehow recognize. But in the film, the leader of this particular ceremony is bitten. He says he had a feeling that his consciousness “slipped,” as it were, so he won’t allow anybody to cure him, and he dies.

  Living as I have in New York City, with no real relationship to animals—except when I was a kid out in the country—I never could understand such things. So it’s amazing to me to hear stories of what can take place between a human being and a wild animal, when these symbolic ideas of sacrifice and compassion are actually worked out in action.

  How can city people

  call upon animal powers

  if they know nothing about animals?

  In Hawaii, I love to watch birds in palm trees. They don’t consciously know that palm leaves will go down when they light on them. But when some little bird lands o
n a leaf that goes down, the bird knows immediately how to catch itself. It’s fantastic. What kind of consciousness is that?

  I remember when I was a kid walking through the woods and came upon a barbed wire fence with a tree leaning up against it. The tree had incorporated the barbed wire, had very neatly taken it into itself. You cannot tell me there isn’t consciousness there. How far down the line does that go?

  In the nineteenth century, when systematic vivisection was beginning to be practiced, the animals being used didn’t matter. Animals did not have consciousness. Their reactions were thought to be just stimulus responses of a mechanistic organism. How far can you push that way of reading life? Can you bring it right up into human beings? Are we also just mechanistic organisms? That’s behavioristic psychology.

  The other extreme is what you get with the Hindu perspective of the ubiquity of ātman and brahman: all things are living things.

  Hindu meditations are intended

  to put you in accord with Nature.

  When you are in accord,

  all the boons come.

  The ego that relates to the other as to a “Thou” is different from the ego that’s relating to an “It.” You can turn anything into a Thou, so the whole world is a Thou. That’s what the mystical experience is supposed to be. As soon as anything is an It, you have duality. I-Thou is not a duality. It is the nondual realization.