Joseph Campbell Short Wisdoms
An Eskimo shaman told a visitor: “That the only true wisdom (the
shaman’s deep intuitive journey) lives far from mankind, out in the great
loneliness, and can be reached only through suffering (mental and physical
extremity) and privation (fasting and endurance) alone open up the mind to
all that is hidden to others.”
Kennedy’s funeral was an example of high service of ritual to a whole
society, a ritualized occasion of great social necessity following the public
murder of a President requiring a compensatory rite to re-establish continuity
& solidarity.
Mythology as remnants that line the walls of our interior belief system.
Rituals evoke the energy and value that the myths contain. The message of
Star Wars and Luke Skywalker is that technology is not going to save us. We
have to rely on our very being, and our deep intuitions & feeling. See the
hero’s journey not as a courageous act, but as a life lived in self discovery.
Luke Skywalker was never more rational than when he discovered within
himself the resources of character to meet his destiny.
The ultimate aim of the life quest as the wisdom and power to serve others.
Preachers err by trying to talk people into belief;
it would be better if they
would reveal the radiance of their own experience and discovery.
The guiding idea of Campbell’s work was to find
the common themes in
world myth, pointing to the constant need in the human psyche to be centered
in deep principles.
Look at myth as an interior road map of experience and understanding
drawn by people who have traveled it.
Truth is one; the sages call it by many names.
How is it that God assumes
such different masks in different cultures, yet comparable myth can be found
in the different traditions: virgin births, incarnations, resurrection, second
comings, and judgment days.
The prime question of our time will be to find the wisdom beyond the
conflicts between illusion and what is true and real so that our lives may
become whole again in the recovery of our spiritual center.
We are all in this present time participating in the greatest leap forward of
the human spirit both to an outside knowledge and a deep interior mystery.
The Shinto priest responding to a question about his ideology at an international conference on religion: “I don’t think we have ideology. We don’t have
theology, we dance.”
A
death and a re-birth occur when the familiar life horizon has been
outgrown, the old concepts, ideas, and emotional patterns no longer fit, and
the time for new beginnings is at hand. The ‘collective unconscious’ points to
the recognition that there is a common humanity built into our minds and
nervous system out of which our ideas & imagination flow.