A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

by Joseph Campbell

  When I was student, still in the Catholic church, there was one week each year when we gave up all our studies and spent our time listening to sermons: some were like the hell sermon Joyce recounts in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man; others were on such themes as the meaning of the sacraments. The purpose of these “retreats,” as they were called, was to remove us from the secular world and put us in a sacred space.

  Such events are examples of the church creating a sacred space, but it’s the church’s sacred space, set up according to its program. Now, if the church is the rope you’re hanging onto, if that is what’s bringing you to your bliss place, then this approach avoids the problem of working this stuff out for yourself. But another way is to have your own little tabernacle, your own sacred space, from which you exclude everything else.

  A sacred space is any space that is set apart from the usual context of life. In the secular context, one is concerned with pairs of opposites: cause and effect, gain and loss, and so on. Sacred space has no function in the way of earning a living or a reputation. Practical use is not the dominant feature of anything in the space. You do not have anything in your sacred space that’s not of significance to you for the harmonization of your own life. In your sacred space, things are working in terms of your dynamic—and not anybody else’s.

  Your sacred space is

  where you can find yourself

  again and again.

  You really don’t have a sacred space, a rescue land, until you find somewhere to be that’s not a wasteland, some field of action where there is a spring of ambrosia—a joy that comes from inside, not something external that puts joy into you—a place that lets you experience your own will and your own intention and your own wish so that, in small, the Kingdom is there. I think everybody, whether they know it or not, is in need of such a place.

  Sacred space and sacred time and something joyous to do is all we need. Almost anything then becomes a continuous and increasing joy.

  What you have to do,

  you do with play.

  I think a good way to conceive of sacred space is as a playground. If what you’re doing seems like play, you are in it. But you can’t play with my toys, you have to have your own. Your life should have yielded some. Older people play with life experiences and realizations or with thoughts they like to entertain. In my case, I have books I like to read that don’t lead anywhere.

  One great thing about growing old

  is that nothing

  is going to lead to anything.

  Everything is of the moment.

  When Jung decided to try to discover the myth by which he was living, he asked himself, “What was the game I enjoyed when I was a child?” His answer was making little towns and streets out of stones. So, he bought some property and, as a way of playing, began to build a house. It was a lot of work, utterly unneces-sary for he already had a house, but an appropriate way to create sacred space. It was sheer play.

  What did you do as a child

  that created timelessness,

  that made you forget time?

  There lies the myth to live by.

  What do you like to do? What have you learned to do? Jung was a big, strong man, and he liked to push rocks around, so that’s what he did. I’ll bet that if you search back, you’ll find connections between the sacred space that you have now and a really special space that you had as a child.

  As an adult,

  you must rediscover

  the moving power of your life.

  Tension, a lack of honesty,

  and a sense of unreality

  come from following

  the wrong force in your life.

  In my own situation, when I was between the ages of about eleven and fifteen, I was crazy about American Indians. My family bought me The Complete Works of Parkman, reports of the Bureau of Ethnology, and all sorts of other books on the subject. I had a very nice little library, with beautiful, bronze, Indian heads that were bookends, and Navajo rugs, and so on. Then the house burned down. It was a terrible crisis in our family. My grandmother was killed. All of my things were gone.

  I now realize that the sacred space I created for myself, the room in which I do my writing, is really a reconstruction—a reactivation, if you will—of my boy-hood space. When I go in there to write, I’m surround-ed by books that have helped me to find my way, and I recall moments of reading certain works that were particularly insightful. When I sit down to do the writing, I pay close attention to little ritual details—where the notepads and pencils are placed, that sort of thing—so that everything is exactly as I remember it having been before. It’s all a sort of “set-up” that releases me. And since that space is associated with a certain kind of performance, it evokes that performance again. But the performance is play.

  Work begins

  when you don’t like

  what you’re doing.

  And if your life isn’t play, or if you are engaged in play and having no fun, well, quit! The spirit of the sacred space is Śiva dancing. All responsibilities are cast off. There are various ways of doing this casting off. and it doesn’t matter how it happens. The rest is play.

  “Any man who is attached to the senses and things of this world…is one who lives in ignorance and is being consumed by the snakes that represent his own passions.” —Black Elk103

  A sacred space is hermetically sealed off from the temporal world. When you’re in such a space, there is no penetration through the enclosure. You are in an eternal zone that is protected from the impact of the stimuli of the day and the hour. That’s what you do in meditation: seal yourself off. The meditation posture is a sealing-off posture, and the regularized breathing furthers your inward-turned explorations. The world is sealed off, and you become a self-contained entity.

  You must have such a sealing-off program for yourself whenever you require it: once a week, once a day, or once an hour. Of what value is that? It is an absolute necessity if you are going to have an inner life. What it provides is an interval in which the eternal within you is disengaged from the field of time. We spoke earlier of God’s making us “to know Him, to love Him, and to serve Him in this world,” out there, “and to be happy with him forever in heaven,” in the hermetically sealed sacred space within yourself. The further you can get into that, the more at peace you will be with whatever happens.

  I was thinking of the sorts of conditions you set up for yourself to achieve the visit to the Grail Castle—for that’s what this sacred space is: the place where your associations are not with the field of phenomenal experience, but with the field of your own inward life. You do not get there in the normal run of life. To visit the Grail Castle, you have to have a sacred space. Then, once you have found the connection in your sacred space, you can perhaps translate it into other parts of your life. But first you have to have a little oil well, as it were, that goes down deep.

  To live in sacred space

  is to live in a symbolic environment

  where spiritual life is possible,

  where everything around you

  speaks of exaltation of the spirit.

  * * *

  I’ve been traveling a lot the last ten years, and when I’m not somewhere I’ve been before, the kind of hotel room I prefer is a completely noncommittal room, an efficient room, the kind you find in a Holiday Inn. I open my bag, put my books on the table, hang my clothes on the open rack, and that’s it: here is Joe Campbell and here are his books—so what more do we have in the world? You can turn any place into a sacred space once you have your own sacred space. However, you can say that sacred space is everywhere only after you have learned, through a meditation discipline or the experience of sacred places, what the sanctity is. It is the metaphoric relevance of the object.

  In sacred space,

  everything is done

  so that the environment

  becomes a metaphor.

  In India, I’ve seen sacred places that are jus
t a red circle put around a stick or a stone in such a way that the environment becomes metaphoric: when you look at that stick or stone, you see it as a manifestation of brahman, a manifestation of the mystery.

  Sacred space is a space that is transparent to transcendence, and everything within such a space furnishes a base for meditation. I’m thinking specifically of those Indian temples with a great wall around them: when you enter through the door, everything within that space is symbolic, the whole world is mythologized.

  The earliest sacred spaces of which we have any evidence might well have been the little shrines of Neanderthal man, where there was a cave-bear skull and a lighted fire to build up a little atmosphere. The first, real sacred spaces were probably caves in southern France and northern Spain, dating from 30,000 B.C. When you go into those caves, you are in a magical sacred space, and your consciousness is transformed. I remember going into the big cave in Lascaux. It was fantastic. That universe down there seemed to be the primary world. The animals above ground were simply reflections of those on the walls of the caves. You don’t want to leave a place like that. The majesty and magic of it all somehow brings you into your own center. And once you are there, then sacred space is everywhere.

  I’ve been a few places like that where I’ve thought, “A breakthrough is possible here. This is a place for the exercises that will bring me to where I want to be.” That’s the whole meaning of a cult. A cult is a sacred place. But if you get stuck in a cult—if you think, “I just can’t be anywhere if I’m not here”—well, that’s too bad. You’re still in training.

  WHEN I was in India, I wanted to meet a real, first-class master, and I didn’t want to hear any more slop about māyā and how you’ve got to give up the world and all that kind of thing. I’d had enough of that for about fifteen or twenty years. I was nosing around, listening, and I heard of one master in Trivandrum, in southwest India, and I decided to go see him. His mystic name was “Sri Atmananda.” I’ll call him that. Now when you get close to a master of that kind, you’re bound to meet a lot of nuts. You just are, there’s no doubt about it. But I knew that if I went, and if I was on the beam, I would get to see him.

  I went to this funny little hotel called the Mascot Hotel, where all the rooms opened out onto a veranda. It was fiercely hot, and I was seated on the veranda, when this chap comes up to me without any introduction, shows me this great big watch, and says, “See that? I have an hour hand, and I have a minute hand, and I have a second hand. ” Before I can respond, he says, “Men have periods, just as women do, only they don’t know it. But I’ve worked mine out. It’s represented on this watch.” I looked at the watch. On it were two little scales, a red and white one on one side and a black and white one on the other, with little indicators that could go this way or that. He points to the red and white scale and says, “When this hand is over on the red side, I’m in my period. When it is in the white, I’m out.” Then pointing to the other scale, he says, “We have mental periods also, and I have those worked out too. When this hand is on the black and the other is on the red, I stay home.” Imagine what it cost him to have that thing made.

  That evening, down in the dining room, I saw a man and woman, who looked like translucent praying mantises. They were seated just across the room, and between them, on the table, was a tall vase, and it was filled with food that they took out and ate with their fingers. Later I met the man and learned that he was president of the International Vegetarian Society. He said he had come to India to reform vegetarianism, that the Indian people didn’t know anything about it! At the next table, two gentlemen were talking, and I heard one of them mention the name “Arthur Gregor.” Now, I knew a young American poet with that name, and I knew that he was in India, so I said, “Pardon me, did I hear you mention Arthur Gregor?” They said, “Yes, he is with Sri Atmananda.” I said, “Would you give him my regards? My name is Joseph Campbell.”

  Two days later, I was invited to meet the guru. If you’re on your right track, that’s the way it goes: doors open miraculously. So, I went to a lovely cottage, and at the door was an Indian with a long, white beard. He said, “The master is upstairs.” I went up to an attic that was perfectly naked except for two chairs. Atmananda was seated in one, and I was to sit in the other, facing him. I mean, it was a real confrontation.

  He said, “Do you have a question?” I had the good fortune, I later learned, to ask exactly the question that had been his first question to his guru, so we had a very good conversation. When we’d concluded, he said he had now to go down to his class. He dismissed me, and I thanked him. Now, I had made arrangements to meet some members of that class in a coffee shop after the class was finished. When I came in, one of them said, “The master said you are on the brink of illumination.” Why? Because of the question I had asked.

  My question was this: “Since all is brahman, all is the divine radiance, how can we say ‘no’ to ignorance or brutality or anything? His answer was: “For you and me, we say ‘yes.’”

  Breaking the ideals of society

  is the path of the mystic.

  Then he gave me a little meditation: “Where are you between two thoughts?” That is to say, you are thinking all the time, and you have an image of your-self. Well, where are you between two thoughts? Do you ever have a glimpse beyond your thinking of that which transcends anything you can think about your-self? That’s the source field out of which all of your energies are coming.

  In meditating,

  meditate on your own divinity.

  The goal of life is to be a vehicle

  for something higher.

  Keep your eye up there

  between the pairs of opposites

  watching your play in the world.

  Let the world be as it is

  and learn to rock with the waves.

  Remain “radiant,”

  as Joyce put it,

  in the filth of the world.

  A Buddha image is not a picture of the historical Buddha. We are all Buddha beings, all things are Buddha beings. So, an image of the Buddha is not a graven image to be understood concretely. It is a meditation tool, something to be seen through. It is a support for meditation on the Buddhahood within you, not a depiction of any actual Buddha “out there.”

  God and Buddhas in the Orient are not final terms like Yahweh, the Trinity, or Allah, in the West—but point beyond themselves to that ineffable being, consciousness, and rapture that is the All in all of us. And in their worship, the ultimate aim is to effect in the devotee a psychological transfiguration through a shift of his plane of vision from the passing to the enduring, through which he may come finally to realize in experience (not simply as an act of faith) that he is identical with that before which he bows.104

  The entire heavenly realm

  is within us, but to find it

  we have to relate to what’s outside.

  It is in this context that one says, “If you see the Buddha coming down the road, kill him.” That is to say, if your notion of Buddhahood is concretized to that extent, then cancel the concretization. You cannot say that about Jesus, at least not in the orthodoxy.

  You must kill your god.

  If you are to advance,

  all fixed ideas must go.

  Most Buddhas that one sees depicted are what are known as “meditation Buddhas,” and they never lived. They represent Buddha powers within all of us, and in contemplating them, you will choose and be guided by your own Buddha—as, in the Catholic tradition, your principle guide is a particular saint, who represents virtues and qualities that are somehow accessible to you. The Buddha image, then, isn’t a picture of the Buddha. It is a tool to help you meditate on the Buddhahood within yourself.

  This whole drift of Buddhism comes to a very clean expression in Zen, where there are no images. The only picture in a Zen monastery would be of Bodhidharma, the wall-gazing teacher who came to China from India, and that image would simply be a reminder of how to meditate. F
inding the Buddha within yourself is a difficult exercise, and sometimes images help. You have to realize that Buddhism is not only an elite religion, but also a popular religion. A popular religion must provide bases for meditation. As a result, there is a long history in Buddhism of relic worship. All of those great stūpas, those monuments of the early Buddhist world, are reliquary mounds. Each one contains a relic, just as every Catholic church is supposed to be built on a relic. It is all a base for meditation.

  Two great divisions of Buddhist thinking are distinguished. The first was dedicated to the ideal of individ-ual salvation and represented the way to this end as monastic self-discipline. The second, which seems to have matured in northern India during and following the first and second centuries A.D. (long after the other had been disseminated as far southward as the island of Ceylon), proposed the ideal of salvation for all and developed disciplines of popular devotion and universal secular service. The earlier is known as the Hīnayāna, “the lesser or little (hīna) boat or vehicle (yāna),” while the second is Mahāyāna, “the great (mahat) boat or vehicle,” the boat in which all can ride.105

  Before the period of Mahāyāna Buddhism, the Buddha was never depicted. Hence, in the illustration of the Buddha’s life on the early stūpas, there are only symbols of the Buddha—his footprints, an umbrella, a sun disk—because the Buddha is one who is identified no longer with his ego but with total consciousness, and consequently, cannot be depicted. He’s like the sun that has set, and you don’t depict what is not. As a result, in early depictions of the Temptation of the Buddha, the temptation is rendered—on one side of the throne are the posturing daughters of Kāma, Lord Desire, and on the other, the ogres of Māra, King Death—but nobody is in the throne. Well, there was nobody there. He was not identified with this personality.