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The Hero’s Journey... Joseph Campbell # 4

/ 45:32/E70
The Hero's Journey # 5


Transcript:
https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/52457379
Speaker 0 (0s): Wow. 

Speaker 1 (22s): I love you guys. What better way to start off the day than with a positive, beautiful message. You know what that message is? What is your message? My message to you is that this is where you're supposed to be. I know sometimes it doesn't seem like it. I know sometimes you feel, or you think what the hell is going on. Why does this always happen to me? Well, it doesn't always happen. But if you asked a stupid question, where do you get? 

You know what you get, look, here's what you gotta know right now. You are probably influencing people that you don't even know right now. You could be making changes in the lives of people that could be eternally grateful for you. Maybe you're doing something right now. Maybe you're setting an example or your paving a road or your beginning of a project. Something that's going to inspire someone later down the line. 

What's important to understand is that your doing what your supposed to be doing? I know it's weird to think about. I know it's difficult to think about, however, understand that life has a plan for you understand. There's a bigger picture, understand that you are the way you know yourself now is not how the way you now know yourself is not the final form of you're being hi. 

Got it. It took me awhile to think about that. I got a little tongue tied there, so excuse my, my little bit of a rant. However, I just couldn't seem to figure out that little part, understand that who you are now is not the final form of who you will be. It's powerful. It's powerful. Welcome back, everybody. 

Welcome back to the true life philosophy podcast. I guess what? I got good news. I'm on the Amazon music. Now, if you're just searched true life, all capitals where you search my name, George Monte on Amazon music. Cow will be right there. And if you leave comments, then you'll be right there with me. And just so you know, you're always there with me. I keep you right here, right? Your next to my heart. Cause I love you. 

Alright. I know. What's your thinking. Hey, we take it easy. What? The mushy stuff, George, we got to get all mushy on me now. Right? All right. All right. All right. I'm with you. Let's talk more about life Journey and the hero's journey, your journey. I think we left off yesterday with the idea that all life is suffering. That's what the Buddha said. 

And so let us jump right back in with both feet and talk to our spiritual guide are our mythological narrator, mr. Joseph Campbell. So mr. Campbell, mr. Campbell, what can you tell us about the young person who says I didn't choose to be born? My mother and father made that choice for me. 

You can't pick your parents. Joseph Campbell Freud tells us to blame our parents' for all of the shortcomings of our life. And Mark's tells us to blame the upperclass of our society. But the only one to blame is oneself. That's the helpful thing about the Indian idea of karma is your life is the fruit of your own doing. You have no one to blame but yourself, but what about chance? 

A drunken driver turns the corner and hit you pal. That isn't your fault. You haven't done that to yourself. Joseph Campbell, from that point of view, is there anything in your life that did not occur as by a chance, there is a matter of being able to accept chance. The ultimate backing of life is chance. The chance that your parents met, for example, chance, or what might seem to be chance is the means through which life is realized. 

The problem is not to blame or explain, but to handle the life that arises. Another war has been declared somewhere and you were drafted into an army and there go five or six years of your life with a whole new set of chance events. The best advice is to take it all as if it had been your intention with that, you evoke the participation of your will in all these journeys with mythology, there's a place where everyone wishes to find out the Buddhists talk have Nirvana. 

And Jesus talks as a piece of the mansion with many rooms is that typical of the hero's journey, that there's a place to find Joseph Campbell, the place to find is within yourself. I learned a little about this in athletics. The athlete who is in top form has a quiet place with in himself. And it's around this somehow that is action occurs. If he's all out there and in the action field, he will not be performing properly. 

My wife as a dancer, and she tells me that this is true in dance as well. There's a center of quietness within which has to be known and held. If you lose that Centre, your intention and begin to fall apart. The Buddhist Nirvana is a center of peace. Have this kind of Buddhism is a psychological religion. It starts with the psychological problem of suffering. All life is sorrowful. 

There is however, an escape from sorrow. The escape is Nirvana, which is a state of mind or consciousness, not a place somewhere like heaven is right here in the midst of the turmoil of life. It is the state you find when you are no longer driven to live by compelling desires, fears, and social commitments. When you have found your center of freedom and can act by choice out of that voluntary action out of this center is the action of the Bodhisattva's joyful participation in the sorrow of the world. 

You were not grabbed because you have released yourself from the grabbers of fear, lust, and duties. These are the rulers of the world. There is an instructive Tibetan, Buddhist painting in which the so called wheel of becoming is represented in monasteries. This painting would not appear inside the cluster, but on the outer wall, what has shown is the mind's image of the world. When still cut in the grip of the fear of the Lord death, six realms of being are represented as spokes of the ever revolving wheel. 

One is of animal life, another of human life, another of the gods and heaven, and the fourth of the soul's being punished in hell of a fifth realm is have the belligerent demon's and tiger gods or Titan's. And the sixth finally is have the hungry ghosts, the souls of those in whose love for others, there was attachment clinging and expectation, the ghost, heavy normous, ravenous, Belize, and pinpoint mouths. 

However, in the midst of each of these realms, there is a Buddha signifying. The possibility of release and illumination in the hub of the wheel are three symbolic beasts, a pig, a caulk, and a serpent. These were the powers that keep the wheel revolving, ignorance, desire, and malice. And then finally the rim of the wheel represents the bounding horizon of anyone's consciousness, who was moved by the try out of powers, have the hub and held on the grip of the fear of death in the center surrounding the hub. 

And what are known as these three poisons are souls, descending in darkness and others ascending to illumination. What is the illumination? Joseph Campbell? The illumination is the recognition of the radiance of one eternity through all things. Whether in the vision of time, these things are judged as good or as eval to come to this, you must release yourself completely from desiring the goods of this world and fearing their loss. 

Judge, not that you be not judged. We read in the words of Jesus. If the doors of perception were cleansed, Road Blake man would see everything as it is infinite. It's a heavy trip. Is this really just for Saint's and monks Joseph Campbell? No, no, I don't think so. I think it's also for artists'. 

The real artist is the one who has learned to recognize and to render what Joyce has called the radiance of all things as an epiphany or showing forth of their truth. But it doesn't this leave all the rest of us ordinary mortals back on shore, Joseph Campbell. I don't, I don't think there is any such thing as an ordinary mortal. Everybody has his own possibility of rapture in the experience of life. 

All he has to do is recognize it and then cultivated and get going with it. I always feel uncomfortable when people speak about ordinary mortals because they have never met an ordinary man, woman or child But is his art is the only way one can achieve this illumination. Joseph Campbell art in religion are the two recommended ways. I don't think you get it through sheer academic when it gets all tangled up and concepts, but just living with one's heart open to others' and compassion is a whey wide open to all Oh. 

So the experience of Alumanation is available to anyone or not just saints or artists, but if it has potentially, and every one of us deep in that unlocked a memory box, how do you unlock it? Well you unlock it by getting somebody to help you unlock it? Do you have a dear friend or a good teacher? It may come from an actual human being or from an experience like an automobile accident or from an illuminating book in my life. 

Mostly it comes from books though. I have had a long series of magnificent teachers. When I read your work. I think what mythology has done for us is to place you on a branch, have a very ancient tree. You are part of a society of the living and dead that came long before you were here and will be here long after you are gone. It nourished you are protected you and you have to nourish it and protect it in return. 

Well, it's been a wonderful support for life. I can tell you it's been tremendous with this kind of resource pouring into my life has done. Some people ask isn't myth, ally Joseph Campbell. No mythology is not a lie. Mythology is poetry. It was a metaphorical. 

It has been Well said that mythology it's the ultimate truth penultimate because the ultimate cannot be put into words. It is beyond words beyond the images, beyond the bounding rim of the Buddhist wheel of becoming mythology pitches the mind beyond that rim to what can be known, but not told. So this is the penultimate truth. It's important to live life with the experience and therefore the knowledge of its mystery and of your own mystery. 

This gives life a new radiance, a new harmony, a new splendor thinking in mythology terms helps to put you in a quarter with the inevitable bills, have this veil of tears. You'll learn to recognize the positive values in what appeared to be the negative moments and aspects of your life. The big question is whether you are going to be able to say a hearty yes. To the adventure. The the adventure of The Hero Joseph Campbell. 

Yes. The you adventure of the Hero, the adventure of being alive. How does one have a profound experience? Joseph Campbell, by having a profound sense of mystery. But if God is the God we have only imagined, or how can we stand in awe of our own creation, Joseph Campbell? 

How can we be terrified by a dream? You have to break past your image of God to get through to the Conneaut. It illumination the psychologist. Young has a relevant saying religion is a defense against the experience of God. The mystery has been reduced to a set of concepts and ideas and emphasizing these concepts and ideas can short circuit. The transcendent keynoted experience as an intense experience of mystery is what one has to regard as the ultimate religious experience. 

That's a beautiful heartwarming definition. Let's listen to that. Again. Religion is a defense against the experience of God. The mystery has been reduced to a set of concepts and ideas and emphasizing these concepts and ideas can short circuit. The transcendent connote to the experience and intense experience of mystery is what one has to regard as the ultimate and religious experience. 

There are many Christians who believe that to find out who Jesus is. You have to go past the Christian faith past the Christian doctrine past with the Christian Church, Joseph Campbell, you have to go past the imagined image of Jesus, such an image of one's God becomes a final obstruction. Once the ultimate barrier, you hold on to your own ideology, your role, a little Manor of thinking. 

And when the larger experience of God approaches and experience greater, then you are prepared to receive you take flight from it by clinging to the image and your mind. This is known as preserving your faith. You know, the idea of the ascent of the spirit through the different centers of archetypal stages of experience. One begins with the elementary animal experiences of hunger and greed and then of sexual Zeel and on the physical mastery of one kind or another. 

These are all empowering stages of, but then when the center of the heart is touched and a sense of compassion awakened with another person or creature, and you realize that you and that other are in some sense, creatures of the one life and being a whole new stage of life in the spirit opens out this opening of the heart to the world is what is symbolized mythologically as the Virgin birth. 

It signifies the birth of a spiritual life and what was formerly an elementary human animal living for the merely physical aims of health, progeny power and a little fun, but now become to something else for, to experience this sense of compassion, a cord, or even identity with another, or with some ego transcending principle that has become lodged in your mind as a good to be revered and served. 

It is the beginning once and for all of the properly religious way of life and experience. And this may then lead to a life consuming quest for a full experience of that one being of beings of which all temporal forms are the reflections. Now this ultimate ground of all being can be experienced in two senses, one as with form and the other as, without and beyond form, when you've experienced your God as with form, there is your envisioning mind, and there is the God, there is a subject and there is an object, but the ultimate mystical goal is to be United with one's God, with that duality is transcended and forms disappear. 

There is nobody. There is no God, no, you get your mind going past all concepts has dissolved and identification with the ground, have your own being because that two, which the metaphorical image of your God refers is the ultimate mystery have your own beam, which is the mystery of the being of the world as well. And so this is it, of course, the heart of the Christian faith is that God was in Christ that these elemental forces you're talking about embodied themselves in a human being who reconciled mankind to God Joseph Campbell. 

Yes. And the basic Gnostic and Buddhist idea is that that is true. Have you and me as well jesus' was a historical person who realized in that he and what he called the father, where one, and he lived out of that knowledge of the Christ hood of his nature. I remember I was once giving a lecture in which I spoke about living out of the sense of Christ in you and a priest on the audience. 

As I was later, told, turned to the woman beside him in whispered that's blasphemy. What did you mean by Christ in you? Joseph Campbell? What I meant was that you must live not in terms of your own ego system, your own desires, but in terms of what you might call the sense of mankind, the Christ in you, there is a Hindu same none, but a God can worship a God. 

You have to identify yourself in some measure with whatever spiritual principle you are, God represents to you in order to worship him properly and live. According to his word in discussing the God within the Christ within the illumination are the awakening that comes within. Isn't there a danger of becoming narcissistic of an obsession with self that leads to a distorted view of oneself and the world Joseph Campbell, that can't happen. 

Of course, that's a kind of short circuiting of the current, but the whole aim is to go past oneself, past one's concept of oneself to that have which one is buttoned in perfect manifestation. When you come out of a meditation, for example, you are supposed to end by yielding all the benefits, whatever there may be to the world, to all living things, not holding them to yourself. You see through are two ways of thinking. 

I am God if you think I here in my physical presence and in my temporal character, and God, then you are mad and have short circuit have the experience. You are God, not in your ego, but in your deepest being where you are at one with the nondual transcendent somewhere, you, you say that we can't become savior figures to those in our circle, our children, our loved ones are neighbors, but never the savior. 

You say we can't be mother and father, but Never the mother and the father. That's a recognition. That's a recognition of limitation, isn't it? Yes. Yes. It is what you think about this savior. Jesus. Well, we just don't know very much about Jesus. All we know our, the contradictory texts that purport to tell us what he said and did. 

Yes. And they were written many years after he lived. Is that true? Joseph Campbell? Yes. But in spite of this, I think we may know approximately what Jesus said. I think the sayings of Jesus, our probably pretty close to the originals, the main teaching of Christ's for example, is love your enemies, but how do you, how do you love your enemy without condoning what the enemy does without accepting his aggression? 

I will tell you how to do that. Do not pluck the mote from your enemies I but pluck the Beame from your own know, one is in a position to disqualify his enemies way of life. Do you think Jesus today would be a Christian, Joseph Campbell? No, not the kind of Christian. And we know perhaps some of the monks and nuns who are really in touch with high spiritual mysteries would be the sort that Jesus was So. 

So you're saying that Jesus might not have belonged to the church. Militant Joseph Campbell. There's nothing militant about Jesus. I don't read anything like that in any of the gospels, Peter drew his sword and cut off the servant's ear. And Jesus said, put back to the sword, Peter, but Peter has had his sword out at work ever since I have lived through the 20th century. And I know what I was told as a boy about a people who weren't yet and never had been our enemies in order to represent them as potential enemies and to justify our attack upon them, a case, a campaign of hatred, ms. 

Representation and denigration was launched of which the Echo's wring to this day and yet were told God has love you once took the same of Jesus. Love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you so that you may be sons of your father, who is in heaven for, he makes the sun to rise on the eval in the good and sends rain on the, just, and the unjust. 

You once took this to be the highest, the noblest, the boldest have the Christian teachings. Do you still feel that way? Joseph Campbell? I think of compassion as the fundamental religious experience. And unless that is their, you have nothing. I'll tell you what the most gripping scripture in the Christian new Testament is for me, I believe help thou my unbelief, right? 

I believe in this ultimate reality that I can and do experience it, but I don't have answers to my questions. I believe in the question, is there a God Joseph Campbell a couple of years ago, I had a very amusing experience. I was in the New York athletic clubs, swimming pool, where I was introduced to a priest who was a professor at one of our Catholic universities. So after I had had my swim, I came and sat in a lounging chair and what we call the horizontal athlete position and the priest who was beside me asked No mr. 

Campbell, are you a priest? I answered no father. He asked, are you a Catholic? I answered. I was father. Then he asked that. And I think it's interesting that he phrased the question in this way. Do you believe in a personal God? No father. I said, and he replied, well, I suppose there is no way to prove by in logic and existence have a personal God. 

If there were father said, I what then would be the value of faith? Well, mr. Campbell said it quickly. It's nice to have met you. And he was off. I felt I had executed a jujitsu, but that was an illuminating conversation to me, the fact that a Catholic father had asked, do you believe in a personal God meant to me that he also recognized the possibility of an impersonal God namely a trend sending a ground or energy in itself. 

The idea of Buddha consciousness, this is awesome and imminent luminous consciousness that informs all things and all lives. We unthinkingly live by fragments of that consciousness, fragments of that energy. But the religious way of life is to live, not in terms of the self interested in tensions of this particular body at this particular time. But in terms of the insight of that larger consciousness, there is an important passage in the recently discovered Gnostic gospel, according to st. 

Thomas, when will the kingdom come? Christ's disciples ask and Mark 13 one. I think it is. We read that the end of the world is about to come. That is to say a mythological image that of the end of the world is their taken as predicting an actual physical historical fact to be. But in Thomas's version, Jesus replies, the kingdom of the father will not come by expectation. 

The kingdom of the father is spread upon the earth and men do not see it. So I look at you now in that sense and the radiance of the presence of the divine is known to me through you through me. Yes. You sure. When Jesus says he who drinks from my mouth will become as I am. And I shall be. He he's talking from the point of view of that being of beings, which we call the Christ, who is the being of all of us, anyone who lives in relation to that, isn't it as Christ. 

Anyone who brings into his life, the message of the world is equivalent to Jesus. That's the sense of that? So that's what you mean when you say I am radiating God to you. Yes. I do sense that there is divinity in the other. And not only that, but what you represent in this conversation and what your trying to bring up out is a realization of these spiritual principles. 

So you are the vehicle, you are radiant of the spirit. It is true for everyone who has reached in his life or her life, the level of the heart. Do you really believe there is a geography of the psyche, Joseph Campbell. This is metaphorical language, but you can say that some people are living on the level of the sex Oregon's and that's all, they're living four. 

That's the meaning of life. This is Freud's philosophy. Is it not? Then you come to the, at Larry in philosophy, have the will to power that all of life is centered on obstructions and overcoming the obstructions. Well, sure. That's a perfectly good life. And those are forms of divinity also, but they are on the animal level. Then there comes another kind of life which involves giving oneself to others one way or another. 

This is the one that's symbolized and the opening of the Hart. What is the source of that life? Joseph Campbell, it must be a recognition of your life in the other. Have the one life in the two of us God is an image for that one life. We ask ourselves where this one life comes from and people who think everything has to have been made by. Somebody will think, well, God made it. 

So God's these sorts of all things. Well then what, what is religion then? Joseph Campbell, the word religion means religio. Linking back. If we say it is the one life in both of us, then my separate life has been linked to the one life religio linked back. This has become symbolized in the images of religion, which represent that connecting link. 

I see Yung, the famous psychologist says that one of the most powerful religious symbols is to circle. He says that the circle is one of the great primordial images of mankind. And that in considering the symbol of the circle, we are analyzing the self. What do you make of that? Joseph Campbell? The whole world is a circle. All have these circular images reflect the psyche. So there may be some relationship between these architectural designs and the actual structuring, the actual structuring of our spiritual functions. 

When a magician wants to work magic, he puts a circle around himself and it is within this bounded circle. This hermetically sealed off area that powers can be brought into play that are lost outside the circle. And I remember reading about an Indian chief, who said, when we pitch camp, we pick up a camp in a circle. When the Eagle builds its nest. The nest is in a circle. 

When we look at the horizon to horizon is in a circle. Circle's were very important to some Indians. Weren't they? Joseph Campbell. Yes, but there are also in much of that. We've inherited from Sumeria in mythology. We have inherited this circle with the four Cardinal points and 360 degrees. The official Sumerian year, it was 360 days with five Holy days, that don't count, which are outside of time. 

And in which they had ceremonies relating their society to the heavens. Now we're losing this sense of the circle in relation to time, because we have digital time where you just have time buzzing buy out of the digital. You get the sense of the flow of time at Penn station in New York. There's a clock with the hours, the minutes, the seconds, the tenths of seconds, and the hundreds of seconds. When you see the hundreds of a second buzzing by you realize how time is running through you, the circle on the other hand represents totality, everything within the circle. 

That's one thing which is encircled and framed. That would be the spacial aspect, but the temporal aspect of the circle is that you leave, you go somewhere and always come back. God is the alpha and the Omega, the source and the end, the circle suggests immediately a completed totality, whether in time or in space, no beginning knowing round and round and round take the year. 

For example, when November rolls around, we have Thanksgiving again in December, comes in, we have Christmas again, not only does the month roll around again, but also the moon cycle, the day cycle, we are reminded of this one. We look at our watches and see the cycle of time. It's the same, our, but another day here, right? You know, China used to call itself the kingdom of the center. 

And the Aztecs had a similar saying about their own culture. I suppose every culture using the circle as the cosmological order puts itself at the center. Why do you suppose the circle became so universally symbolic, Joseph Campbell, because it's experienced all the time in the day, in the year in leaving home to go on your adventure hunting or whatever it may be. And coming back home, then there was a deeper experience to the mystery of the womb and the tomb. 

When people are buried, it's for a rebirth, that's the origin of the burial idea. You put someone back into the womb of the mother earth for rebirth, very early images of the goddess. Show her as a mother receiving the soul back again. When I read your works, the masks of God or the way have the animal powers are the mystic mythic image. I often come across images of the circle, whether it's A in magical designs or in architecture, both ancient and modern, whether it's in the dome shaped temples of India or the paleolithic rock engravings of Rhodesia, where the calendar stones are the Aztecs where the ancient Chinese bronze shields or the visions of the old Testament, prophet EZQ who talks about the wheel on the sky. 

I keep coming across this image in this ring. I, a wedding ring is a circle too. What does that all symbolize? Joseph Campbell. That depends on how you understand marriage. The word SIM bowl itself means two things put together. One person has one half the other, the other half, and then they come together. Recognition comes from putting the ring together, the completed circle. 

This is my marriage. This is the merging of my individual life and a larger life. That is up to where the two of our one, the ring indicates that we are in one circle together. Well, well, well, what do you think? My friends, isn't it beautiful? I think it's amazing. At some times when we get stuck, the answer's are in our past. 

Sometimes in order to move forward, we need to look at the past. Do you think that your, the only person to face the demon's to face the world to face the obstacles in front of you? If you think no, one's faced them before. That's what The, Hero S Journey is about. When you feel alone, you can go back and read the words of people that have come before you. 

There's a mythological roadmap that can show you a way around any obstacle. There's none too high. There's none too low. The Road to redemption the road to enlightenment is a pathway that's been traveled before. And in fact, it's probably a circle. 

It's probably a circle. By the time you get back to where you're going. I once heard it say that I once heard someone say that once one has achieved enlightenment, the only thing left to do was laugh in. It seems to me, it seems to me, you going to end up right where you start. And that is probably one enlightenment. 

His is probably That very understanding were walking in circles. It's a beautiful thing because of my friends. I love you super stoked to here with me. I hope you have an amazing day. I hope more importantly, you've you get out of these lessons, what I'm getting, and I hope you inspire other people. 

Speaker 4 (41m 35s): Ah, 

The Hero’s Journey... Joseph Campbell # 4

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