When I was invited by Dr. Mary Watkins, director of Pacifica Graduate Institute’s Liberation Psychology program, to volunteer to teach a correspondence course with inmates from a California state prison, I responded to her request with a course on personal mythology using Joseph Campbell’s The Hero With a Thousand Faces. Now, some 18 months later, I am so grateful that I did not refuse her call. In their respective essays, I discovered that one shared experience the inmates wrote about is that Campbell’s mythic narratives as well as his own reflections in Hero gave them a story in which they could place their woundedness within a larger frame. One student was attracted to Campbell before we began working together through the Bill Moyers’ series, The Power of Myth. My course offering, he said, created an opportunity to explore Campbell further with guidance from the course structure and my writing meditations. But more importantly, many wrote that what they sought was a purpose in prison that the Hero, as well as other courses, encouraged and helped shape within them. Resentment, hostility, a sustained anger and feeling out of control—all emotions that initially placed some of my students in prison—yielded to a search for meaning through rekindling a spiritual life they had left behind, or exploring the practice of Buddhism, or attending programs on addiction. In their essays they expressed how Campbell’s stages in the hero’s journey illuminated their own histories wherein they either refused an earlier calling or had accepted their calling within the confines of prison life. Readings in the Hero volume validated many of their choices. One student in particular wrote of how his inability to forgive himself and others who misled him in life resulted in his imprisonment. He used the metaphor of being turned into a monster by his unforgiving attitude. Reading Campbell, he saw his life’s path with increased clarity and realized that he could re-author the plot of his own story by using the stages of the hero’s journey. This template tempered his behavior and moderated his outbursts in prison. Most dramatically, however, was that several inmates acknowledged Campbell’s authentic and compassionate prose had softened them and taught them to speak more deeply about their own self-annihilation and recovery. They also found meaningful parallels between 12-Step programs of recovery and Campbell’s stages of the hero’s journey. One student phrased it this way: “Working with the 12-Step program and Buddhist teachings, along with Campbell’s insights, helped me understand myself better and to live in a peaceful, healthy direction.” On one assignment I asked, “Where in your own life have you found yourself following the pattern Campbell lays out in ‘Departure, Initiation, Return?’” (Hero 23-31) Their profound, insightful and authentic responses to this mythical pattern opened each of them to their own personal myth. In a word that Campbell uses often in his writing, they discovered “correspondences” with their own story. I in turn realized more fully how myths can be aspirational by offering students a mythic narrative that they grasp as universal, and yet live out with great personal particularity. Two of them wrote that initially they reluctantly attended an AA meeting. Now, they host them. One discovered that he had talents as an artist; he sent me one of his paintings to share this newly-found form of personal expression. I should also mention that they found Campbell’s writing accessible, and filled with vitality and encouragement. From this rich set of experiences, assisted directly by Campbell’s classic work, I became more aware of the power of myth to incite explorations into their own adventure. I have also noticed that, yes, they are incarcerated—some for life—but they are no longer imprisoned. By this I mean that imprisonment feeds the victim archetype, but by understanding themselves as incarcerated they locate a level of freedom that sustains them. Incarceration is physical, while imprisonment is psychological and mythic. Through reading and writing on sections of the Hero image, they envisioned their own narratives in a different, more complex light. Some remarked that in prison they have found a level of freedom never experienced before, in part because they felt they had reclaimed parts of themselves heretofore buried. The act of reclamation and self-affirmation is exactly the psychological move Campbell describes in The Masks of God, Vol. 3: Occidental Mythology: “The virtue of heroism must lie, therefore… not in the will to reform, but in the courage to affirm, the nature of the universe.” (319) While meditating on their personal myth, prompted by Campbell’s insights, they expressed how they discovered their basic goodness: that the mistakes they made, often accompanied by substance abuse, no longer defined them. They ceased conflating their identity with their crime.  Several admitted that assisting others in prison has gifted their lives with joy and a more generous orientation to life. The Hero’s journey affirmed and further supported their own life’s direction, a greater self-awareness, and the value of being in service to others. Incarcerated, they nonetheless stepped out of their angry, resentful cocoon of self-imprisonment. One student admitted that he began once more to love who he is and to connect with others in similar compassionate ways. This latter may be the most valuable consequence of their development and the various faces of the hero played an instrumental part in achieving such self-acceptance.

One more idea: mythology as the second womb—it must be constructed of the stuff of modern life. The tendency of the clergy is to hold to the past and therefore reject, not redeem, the contemporary world. A variant of this is the romantic exoticism of the American devotees of the swamis. In my visit to India I have found myself more interested in the relationship of the West to the East than in the East itself. (Asian Journals 237) As we moved into Campbell’s Asian Journals this month, I was reminded of his famous aphorism not to “get stuck on the metaphor.” One of the dangers implicit in treating Asian mythology—and the technical vocabulary of Asian spiritual practice—with the kind of exotic romanticism he mentions here is that the metaphors can get sticky…and stickier. It’s easy enough to get stuck on the metaphors of one’s own mythological inheritance, but adding myths and metaphors from outside the bubblewrap of your own culture makes this even easier—and more tempting. But wait a sec: getting “stuck on the metaphor” keeps us from engaging the very experiences the metaphor is for, and we need to connect with those experiences in order to continue along the pilgrimage toward our authentic selves. How could that be tempting? Well, cotton candy is tempting too, so let’s stick (ha!) with that metaphor. Metaphors can be sticky for a number of reasons. Sometimes it feels as if assimilating the mythical vocabulary from other cultures, by itself, is satisfying. Rattling off the names of deities, or meditative states, or arcane Taoist practices, and being able to describe how they’re related to each other can make us almost feel as if we've experienced these states, even when we haven’t. Example: “Here is your moment of Zen.” I love John Stewart but… uh, no. Eating cotton candy can be satisfying (if not nutritionally) all on its own. Stickiness is part of the fun. Sometimes, a bit more generously, the terms have to suffice on their own because the experience they point to might require years of difficult practice. Example: qi flow, satori, or wu wei. Even Master Ma Yueliang, a major figure in the development and popularity of Wu-style taijiquan, insisted that it had taken him a decade or two to really get the hang of his own qi. I suspect many of us know long term Zen or yoga practitioners who are, at this point, well acquainted with satori and dhyarna and who will smile, somewhat indulgently, when you ask them to explain these ideas. They require practice and experience, not simply memorizing phrases in books. Even if you’re hungry, you might have to make do with cotton candy until you get home for dinner, and real food.  Real food is nutritious, but it takes preparation. Sometimes—and this one stings a bit—we cling to the metaphors because we prefer the superficial mystique and cachet they bring to our speech while avoiding the difficulties involved in actually understanding them: it makes you look cool.  Theodor Adorno, the Frankfurt School philosopher, called this the Jargon of Authenticity. Being able to sling snazzy jargon saves us the trouble of having to experience, or understand, the concepts the jargon is referring to. Appropriating the unfamiliar vocabulary and metaphysical or religious concepts from other cultures makes it easy to hide our ignorance inside the ambiguity these terms present to western ears. This is how the romanticism and appropriation of foreign culture begins. It’s easy to hide inside a technical vocabulary, especially when we’re translating across not only formidable linguistic barriers, but cultural ones as well. Example: This is what Campbell was describing above when he mentioned over-earnest devotees of sacred texts from outside their own traditions.  More often than not, they seem to have become enthralled by the will-o’-the-wisp romanticized exoticism in the metaphors they’ve embraced— and being able to sling this jargon in social circumstances is both appealing to our egos and infinitely preferable to the difficult work of practicing. In the old martial arts axiom, you must “eat bitter” and in good humor to taste the sweet. Sticking (!) with our cotton candy metaphor here, most people (and this includes all of us from time to time) prefer to eat sweet—and to be seen eating sweet. But I can think of one more even more tempting reason to get stuck: Sometimes we get complacent, comfortable, and determined to remain stuck on these metaphors because, consciously or unconsciously, we don’t want to go where they’re directing us. Sometimes we don't want an authentic life.  Sometimes we don't want wisdom. Sometimes it is deeply satisfying to spend time sucking on the cotton candy of our own ego gratification. In the context of the Hero’s Journey, we might say that The Refusal of the Call conceals itself inside the yummy frosting of sticky metaphors. Maybe sticky metaphors are among the threshold guardians we must confront to embark on that journey toward ourselves. Thanks for musing along, Mark

While in Tokyo on Wednesday, April 20, 1955, Joseph Campbell wrote in his journal about an item he read in the morning paper: Einstein’s formula for success: A = XYZ. A is success in life. X is work, Y is play, and Z is keeping your mouth shut. If it weren’t for the fact that I seem to have a much lower resistance to silence than most people I might be able to add Z to my mixture. Meditation for the acquisition of Z: a. Ok, nobody’s talking: so what! and b. Formulate a question (Asian Journals 428) It’s easy to quickly breeze past Campbell’s anecdote without considering a few thoughts. First, Campbell’s candor suggests that, like many of us, he wrestled with silence. Of course, most of us are glad that Campbell chose not to be silent when given the opportunity to speak, as his words have been meaningful to us. However, silence seemed to be a discipline he recognized the value of yet struggled to practice, at least in public venues at this point in his journey. Second, Campbell’s almost comic solution for dealing with silence is to break it: to formulate a question instead, and invite others to do the talking. A few months after Campbell’s April comments on silence, he returns to the subject on Monday, July 4. He states, “In Zen, it seems, the great road and chief exercise is sitting in meditation; reading and study are also strenuously practiced – in spite of all the sayings which would seem to suggest precisely the opposite” (567). Again Campbell seems to be exploring the silent traditions and customs surrounding him while simultaneously pointing to the difficulties in the practice. I’ve sometimes wondered how a young Joseph Campbell might have maneuvered in our modern world of social media. Ours is an age where silence has become a rare commodity. We are constantly spoken to (and many times shouted at), both with visuals and audio, through televisions, phones, computers, and any number of communication and entertainment devices. In a world where individuals are more often treated as consumers than humans, multi-billion-dollar industries work around the clock to assure we are never afforded a moment of silence. It seems that precious silent moments are only granted to honor significant deaths or sacrifices, speaking to the enduring sacredness of such acts. One evening this week, a car blazed through my neighborhood and careered into a wooden pole that carried electricity, phone service, and internet access from home to home. All the devices and appliances that normally keep me from silence were struck mute in an instant. My cell phone couldn’t connect to Wi-Fi. My television gave up the ghost. Even the hum of my refrigerator was struck with a sudden case of laryngitis. I spent the next two hours in utter silence. It was divine. It was refreshing. It was also frightening. It was lonely. Like Campbell, I wrestled with the silence. I recognized that noise had become a conversation partner that was constantly speaking to me yet never listening. Comforting me by continually assuring me that it was there. I wondered if this was actually preferable to the abandonment of silence. Questions kept rising to meet me from the nothingness: When was the last time I remembered my life being this quiet? Why can’t I hear airplanes, crickets, or something? Why does quietness sound so... loud? After a few moments, I began to hear something subtlety traversing the silence. It was my body—my own heartbeat.  It was when I was surrounded by silence, that I began speaking to myself. The messages I spoke to myself were soft, accented with low bass notes of the bodily beat that accompanied them. They were messages beyond words or language. Even in the midst of sound, there seemed to be something desirable in the pursuit of silence. Later in the summer of 1955, on Wednesday, August 17, Campbell seems to have discovered a new framework around silence, one that seems to resonate more deeply with him. After becoming fascinated with Tea, he writes, “The essence of Tea…is activity and calm together: form and ecstasis” (629). Campbell’s words describe perfectly the experience of sitting alone in the darkness of my home, my heartbeat the only partner to the silence. It was indeed activity and calm together: form and ecstasis—a silence that was also a journey.

In Chapter IV of The Masks of God, Vol. 2: Oriental Mythology, Joseph Campbell supplies his readers with a quote from the Buddha’s Fire Sermon, a dharma talk focused on renunciation and developing an “aversion” to the material world, including expressions of the self in body, mind, and imagination: And in conceiving this aversion, he becomes divested of passion, and by the absence of passion he becomes free, and when he is free he becomes aware that he is free; and he knows that rebirth is exhausted, that he has lived the holy life, that he has done what it behooved him to do, and that he is no more for this world.(295) One gets the sense that “this sorrowful world,” as Campbell refers to it, “will go on forever,” (323) and as a result, there appears to be a powerful religious instinct to escape suffering by leaving the world and physical, biological life entirely. Lifetime after lifetime of ascetic practice is designed to burn off karma and blow out the flame of life, ending the cycles of death and rebirth by reaching nirvana (which literally means blowing out, or quenching). The negation of earthly life isn’t unique to Asian religious traditions; Christianity similarly disparages the material world and worldly existence, and looks beyond it to an eternal life in heaven spent in the presence of God. In a very, very broad sense, the main difference between the two is that Christianity, lacking the eternally recurring and reincarnating life monad, limits rebirth to a transformation of consciousness. I can’t help but conclude that the life negating reflex exhibited in most religions is evoked by a literalization of mythology because, if one participates completely, wholly, in religious life, the narratives and symbols of the religion must be understood to be literally true, historically real, and ultimately irrefutable. In such a cast of mind, the world and worldliness is bad, fallen, a prison. The world is often problematic for human beings, it is true, but it is also true that the world's ubiquitous beauty, its inexhaustible stores of wonder, dazzles the soul and confounds the understanding. I sometimes find myself longing for a re-engagement with the Renaissance ideals of Giambattista Vico’s humanism, with Ficino’s explorations of consciousness, enthusiastic, even joyful, textual criticism, and the re-emergence of the primacy of aesthetic ideals. I still yearn for what Lionel Trilling called, “the old classical culture, that wonderful imagined culture of the ancient world which no one but school boys, schoolmasters, scholars, and poets believe in.” (Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning, 112) Having said that, I know full well that my romanticized fantasy of classical life never existed in reality in the way in which it lives in my imagination. Certainly there exists a middle way between a hopeless, passive resignation to life, and Sallekhana, a means of self-destruction that simultaneously destroys karma and the possibility of rebirth by suppressing, and ultimately abandoning, all physical and mental activities. It’s not that I can’t see logic at work in the practice of Sallekhana; in fact, I do. The deliberate negation of life suggests that there is at least a modicum of humanity beyond the reach of institutional and cultural control, and that this residue of unadulterated, incorruptible humanity, small and unappreciated though it may be, serves as a critique of culture, a criticism of life itself, and prevents life lived in the agora from becoming all-consuming, over-determining, and imperiously monolithic. The horrifying sight of Buddhist monks self-immolating during the Vietnam War remains, perhaps, the most poignant of examples. However, living outside of these religious traditions, this ultimate self-abnegation seems so extreme as to contradict religious tenets of ahimsa, prohibitions against causing injury or death to any living creature. But there is an argument to be made from within the tradition that this severity is a part of one’s ethical and moral effort to know what is real—to seize reality from the powerful grip of illusion and desire. But I fail to be persuaded by these arguments because, at the heart of the matter, self-annihilation necessarily prohibits transformation of the self, and by extension, the world. One who is truly spiritually awakened shares their gifts with others who, in turn, are transformed, and eventually their transformation transforms the world. In his novel Howard’s End, E.M. Forster wrote “Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him.” It is the idea of death, not actual death itself, which is redemptive. The idea of death saves one from the loss of self demanded by the dehumanized activities institutions and the materialistic beliefs of a culture or society precisely because it concentrates the mind on what is most significant about human existence—its loves, its passions, its triumphs, as well as its beautiful failures, and its human—all-too-human—frailties. Samuel Taylor Coleridge believed that the willing suspension of disbelief constitutes poetic faith; incidentally, it also constitutes scientific methodology, technological innovation, and especially mythological thought. Suspending disbelief means that we set aside our own beliefs and consider possibilities that previously, we had been unable to imagine. Thinking in the metaphors of myth rather than the reified literalisms of religious dogma reveals, not mere arguments from authority or appeals to faith, but rather, the activated symbols, clues, and the personal intuitions that can take one to the brink of transcendent states. The truths we receive from mythology are revelations about what it means to be a human being, they are revelations of life itself. To make use of those truths, we must remain engaged in life as it is. If we negate or manage to escape life, we forfeit those truths. Rainer Maria Rilke, in his Ninth Duino Elegy, put it this way: But because truly being here is so much; because everything hereapparently needs us, this fleeting world, which in some strange waykeeps calling to us. Us, the most fleeting of all.Once for each thing. Just once; no more. And we too,just once. And never again. But to have beenthis once, completely, even if only once:to have been at one with the earth, seems beyond undoing. Thanks for reading,

The pathways that guide people to the land of myth are many. For me, it was a path called art. Growing up in a small town in East Texas, storytelling was in the very air we breathed. However, I was never content with just any story. I was always looking for something just under the surface of the narrative. I always wanted…something…something I couldn’t quite put words to in the stories I experienced. This ineffable magic always ran in the DNA of the stories I loved most. I sometimes wondered why I enjoyed stories of King Arthur’s quests as much as I enjoyed Star Wars and if one day, I would need to declare an allegiance in order to fully be accepted into one of those tribes. While I was raised in a hotbed of religious fervor, it was these other sorts of stories, this type of art, that brought me to consider the big questions, like what it meant to be fully human and alive. Perhaps it was my religious upbringing, but I was always drawn to stories about the supernatural and other worlds, including worlds that my faith tradition had given me a framework for: heaven and hell. I suppose the land of myth was a distant homeland I was always destined to be drawn to. In Myths of Light, Joseph Campbell says that “The realms of the gods and demons—heaven, purgatory, hell – are of the substance of dreams. Myth, in this view, is the dream of the world. If we accept gods as objective realities, then they are the counterpoint of your dream – this is a very important point – dream and myth are of the same logic” (70). This mystic relationship between myth and dream always felt true to me, even before I had the language to articulate it. This might be because so many of the stories that I would later learn were mythic were ones I first experienced in the dark, as though I was asleep and the myth I was experiencing was my dream. I devoured mythic narratives in the darkness of the movie theater and in my bed at night, reading only by the illumination of a flashlight. A couple of years ago I had another dream-like mythic experience, again in the darkness, this time in the darkness of a Broadway theater. Anaïs Mitchell’s Hadestown intertwines two mythic stories — that of the young dreamers Orpheus and Eurydice, and that of King Hades and his wife Persephone. The musical had opened to critical acclaim and received numerous awards and nominations, including a total of 14 nominations at the 73rd Tony Awards — the most for the evening — and eight wins, including Best Musical and Best Original Score. Set in a Great Depression-era inspired post-apocalyptic world and narrated by the god Hermes, Hadestown manages to accomplish the rare feat of dealing directly with well-known myths, yet still managing to communicate something fresh about the mythic state of our current world. I sat in the theater that night thinking that it had happened again: art had again transported me to that land of myth that felt like home since I was young. Watching Orpheus, Eurydice, Hades, and Persephone come to life before my eyes on that stage caused me to once again think of Campbell’s words as I lay in bed that night. Further discussing the deities and their domains, he said, “All the heavens and gods are within you and are identical with aspects of your own consciousness on the dream level” (70). My dreams were initiated that evening with considerations of the figures, Orpheus and Persephone, that both lived inside of me. I was challenged by thoughts of the Hades and Eurydice that I knew existed within my own psyche. This sacred work carried out by myth, and in my case by the artistic expressions of myth, have reshaped who I am and remind me of who I could yet be. They have renewed me, again and again. I’m honored to announce that the Joseph Campbell Foundation is partnering in two new endeavors with musical artist Ani DiFranco’s Righteous Babe Radio. The station will be featuring episodes from podcasts on JCF’s MythMaker Podcast Network in May – a project they are calling MythMaker May. Another forthcoming endeavor will be a recorded audio conversation between Bob Walter, President of the Joseph Campbell Foundation, Anaïs Mitchell, creator of Hadestown, Rachel Chavkin, director of Hadestown, and Ani DiFranco, owner of Righteous Babe Records and the voice of Persephone on the Hadestown album released on Righteous Babe in 2010, about the intersection of music and myth in Hadestown. Support MythMaker May on Righteous Babe Radio and keep an eye on JCF.org and follow JCF’s social media channels for more information on our future mythic endeavors.

“Read myths as newspaper reports by reporters who were there and it doesn’t work. Reread them as poems and they become luminous,” [(9) writes Joseph Campbell in Myths of Light as he invites us to cultivate faithful, imaginal thinking and intuitive perception, a subjective process that’s neither fanciful nor misguided. We often don’t have the language, or indeed the mental syntax, for the intuited unknown and so we’re obliged to reach into and employ the poetic mind. This mind enables us to better explore nascent truths that aren’t yet tangibly manifested. These truths are emergent and exist on the growing edge of our soul’s horizon. One of the motivating forces for our pursuit of deep learning is our longing for universality, which includes the integral coherence of the Kosmos within the psyche. A poetic and symbolic sensibility assists this endeavor because many of the most important lessons of life are expressed through pictorial narratives. Indeed, eternal truths are usually best conveyed through myth, parable, allegory, and metaphor. Unfortunately, though, when we solely exercise intellectuality, the proclivity of this faculty to commission rigid thinking and mechanization brings a disjunctive force into ourselves and into our surroundings. By engaging in pictorial thinking – and its imaginative fluency – we invigorate the spirit and nature realms together with the physical world. In Myths of Light, Campbell nourishes us with such vivid, descriptive visual thoughts and wealth of imagery that we’re virtually initiated into their rich, imaginative tones and textures. For example, the stories “The Tigers and the Goats” and “The Cry of the Buddha Child” provide a glimpse into an inner understanding of the world, and ourselves, because they are interior chronicles of who we are. “So this is what the story tells us: we are all tigers living among these goats. So go into the forest, and in the forest of the night, find the tiger burning bright in your own profound depths.” (140) Frequently, it’s necessary to wrestle with the pictures of a narrative in our minds and souls to arrive at their deeper truths. The over-intellectualized mind struggles to apprehend these truths. And far too readily our nervous system becomes depleted if it’s engaged in constant, mental abstraction devoid of any iconographic content. It’s why, in this era of “fake news,” we desperately crave the poetic and mythological narratives with their vast, lyrical, pictorial palettes. And when we merely inhabit the mental analytics of our existence, we begin to lose the essential patterns, textures and tones of the whole. We then struggle to find even the simplest pattern, no matter how much effort of will or intelligence we apply. The mind depleted of an imaginal capacity cannot solve our inmost anguishes or commune with our higher longings. To be creatively fertile is life’s true survival. It’s why Novalis wrote, “Poetry heals the wounds inflicted by reason.” And it’s also why Campbell reminds us, “To see life as a poem and yourself participating in that poem is what the myth does for you.” Campbell describes the rebirth of the sun, moon, lion, bull, eagle, serpent, and the figures of the early mythologies across cultures in respect to the vegetal rebirth of life. He does it in such an engaging and poetic way that his words themselves become alive, a pictorial creation. The language of metaphor and imagery leads us towards the existence of deeper meanings and truths because such imagery connects, while the intellect, roaming on its own, has the inevitable inclination to only see and seek separation. Its tendency is to divide the world into parts and demand fixity of them. A famous statement of Campbell’s advises, “If you want to change the world, you have to change the metaphor.” And all too often we’re trying to change the world through a linear mind, when in reality, it can only (ultimately) be transformed through the non-linear – metaphors, myths, dreams, symbols – and cultivated affectionately through a caressing, inner knowing. It’s our duty to honor the inner life through accepting and respecting the fluidity and flexibility of the psyche – to not over-prioritize the literal and material to the detriment of the imaginative and spiritual. This book serves as a reminder to reconnect with the Kosmos because it inspires us to seek the light, to dwell in the divine mysteries, and to develop a fruitful, archetypal eye in the process. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe said, “He who cannot draw on three thousand years is living from hand to mouth.” So how today can we evoke both the visible artistic and the invisible, yet felt, mytho-poetic forces, which weave in and around us awaiting our recognition? In exactly the same way that many folk songs and stories are encoded with meaningful messages through their purposeful marrying of the illumined mythic with quotidian life. For when we reach for something far more metaphorical, more imaginal, more poetic and indeed, more luminously mythic in the everyday, and within ourselves, we may truly embrace these words of Campbell’s. “The message of the Buddha is simple but profound: we are to seek joyful participation in the suffering of the world.” (125). And perhaps, we could also add, “participation in the deep telos of the world.”

Campbell was fond of talking about dualities and how getting beyond them forms a critical part of the hero’s journey: dualities like finite and infinite, transcendent and immanent, sacred and profane. The blooms of April provide us with an excellent opportunity to talk about these dualities and a lesson, a pollen path, to help us navigate between them. The lesson is about a famous flower. Aum maṇi padme hūṃ. The jewel is in the lotus. You’ve probably heard this before. Let’s start with Campbell. “‘The jewel (maṇi) in the lotus (padme),’ signifies, on one level: the immanence of nirvāṇa (the jewel) in saṁsāra (the lotus); another: the arrival of the mind (the jewel) in nirvāṇa (the lotus).” (Masks of God, Volume 2: Oriental Mythology 484) The lotus sinks its roots deep in the muck of the river bottom while the leaves float on the surface. The flower sticks up out of the water entirely and, strangely, it’s one of the only plants that produces seeds and flowers at the same time. Reaching for the sky, sunk in the mud, and numinous beauty nourished in the filth of the world, “the jewel in the lotus” represents the simultaneous presence of the infinite in the finite and of the transcendent made immanent. It represents the experience of moving beyond the dualities that condition our normal mode of thinking. But how do we do that? The first thing is to acknowledge the conditioning frameworks by which society has taught us to understand the world and ourselves, to recognize the cultural cognitive bifocals strapped on at birth that encourage us to see the world in black-and-white. Black-and-white has certain advantages: it’s easy, it satisfies our need to believe we’ve understood something, and we can take refuge from the complexities of life by reducing the often incomprehensible indeterminacies of ethics, politics, and love to easily digestible categories. Like all fast food, these interpretive frames provide a delicious and satisfying psychological meal – but provide little nutritional value. Dining on the simplistic, if yummy, world of black-and-white we find ourselves prone to the threat of spiritual heart disease. “Shut up, I don’t care!” my ego hollers. “I want more fries! And pass the ketchup!” The trick, as always, is not merely identifying the truth – that the world and our lives are tessellated with complex, overlapping shades of gray. Nope. Everybody knows that already. The trick is finding a way to put us into relationship with this truth and for that you need a metaphor; for that, you need a myth. That’s what the jewel in the lotus does. I mentioned transcendence and immanence in a previous Mythblast, and how they look leaky. But leaky is only how they look through the bifocals of duality. Once you recognize the conditioning frames of your understanding, once you take off the bifocals, transcendence and immanence can be seen as simultaneously present in the same moment – everywhere and everywhen as the transcendent unfolds into the field of time and space. In the West, William Blake probably said this best: To see a World in a Grain of SandAnd a Heaven in a Wild FlowerHold Infinity in the palm of your handAnd Eternity in an hour – but wait a sec: something can be transcendent and immanent at the same time? Yep. “But isn’t that just a dumb contradiction?” demands my logical brain. It might look like a contradiction, but it’s not. It’s a paradox. Let’s take a quick detour. Contradiction is the technical term for how your understanding interprets the conjunction of two mutually exclusive statements. Typically we assume one must be true while the other one is false: black and white, finite and infinite, Bears or Packers, etc. So far, so good. In a paradox you are once again confronted by the conjunction of two, mutually exclusive statements but, in this case, both are true. This suggests that embracing paradox is required to move beyond the dualities that lock us into black-and-white thinking and that dualities are dissolved by paradox but thrive in contradiction. Back to the flowers. “The jewel in the lotus” does not represent transcendence and immanence taking turns but the paradoxical simultaneity characterized in Campbell’s description of apotheosis from the Hero’s Journey. It is the recognition of eternity concealed in the forms of the finite and the temporal. At first glance it is tempting to believe that apotheosis marks the end of a mythic journey, that the jewel in the lotus marks the end of our pilgrimage. Aha! Enlightenment! (I mean, c’mon. Apotheosis literally means to “make into a god.” You’d think that’d be plenty.) Alas, no. This experience of seeing the transcendent as immanent and immanence as transcendent is not the end of the journey, but confirmation that we have endured, embraced, and transited the dualities of daily life – a life in which (for most of us, most of the time) the transcendent plays peekaboo, interrupting the finitudes of daily life with disruptive glimpses of the eternal. But those transitory glimpses are bait on the hook of our authentic lives. I might note in passing, since this year’s April included Easter, that this is a useful way to access the mythological import of Jesus nailed on the Cross. In that moment He represents both the finite sacrificed to the infinite and the infinite sacrificed for the sake of the finite: two mutually exclusive statements, both of which are true. There’s a jewel in the lotus for sure. But, as Campbell noted, myth leans toward the comic and away from the tragic mood and I’m compelled now to imagine what would happen if we translated this into Norse mythology. We’d have to expand the symbol to include that rascally squirrel Ratatoskr, maybe as a fish, swimming from root to lotus and lying to the jewel about what the muck has been saying. Thanks for musing along,

There is a story from the ancient Hebrew tradition in II Samuel 12 where a king spots the beautiful wife of a young warrior bathing on her roof. He sends for her and the two sleep together shortly thereafter. Upon learning the woman has become pregnant, the king sends the woman’s husband to the frontlines of a nearby battle where the fighting is most fierce, and therefore ensures his death.  A prophet travels to see the king and rather than rebuke his morals in the way that prophets were prone to do in those days, the prophet instead tells the king a story. The story is about two men, one rich and one poor. While the rich man had a plethora of sheep and cattle, the poor man had but one little ewe lamb. The poor man cherished the lamb, sharing his food with the animal and even sleeping with it in his arms, like a child. One day, when the rich man had a visitor arrive from out of town, rather than taking one of his own sheep to slaughter for a meal, he took the poor man’s lamb. Hearing this story, the king exploded in anger, demanding to know the identity of the rich man. Of course, the irony of the king’s inability to recognize the biographical nature of the story is lost on no one…except the king. The prophet used a story to bypass the king’s head and go straight to his heart. The story acted as a mirror, allowing the king to see his true self. Stories have long been one of the most powerful forces in the human experience. Study after study reveals that human behavior is less motivated by logic than we would prefer to believe, but instead relies on the narratives we create for our lives. Statistics and physical proof of something rarely changes our behavior, but stories seem to succeed where facts and figures do not. The role of the storyteller cannot be underestimated in the Hebrew story. His use of art to spark self-examination in the mind of the king is a testimony to how significant narrative is and how essential it can be in making meaning for us. From storytelling prophets to warrior poets, the sword falls under the might of the pen and a powerful potentate is no match for a well-told story. Recently I was invited into a conversation about what differentiated Joseph Campbell’s work around the hero’s adventure from that of his predecessors, who offered stages of initiation that resemble aspects of the monomyth. The most significant factor that has caused Campbell’s work to resonate so deeply where so many others have not: story. He took the patterns that many had seen previously in human rituals and practices and applied them to our speculative fiction. He recognized that our stories said as much about who we are as our behavior did. At this year’s Golden Globe Awards, Jane Fonda expanded on the essential role of story in our humanity: [I]n turbulent crisis-torn times like these, storytelling has always been essential. You see, stories ... can change our hearts and our minds. They can help us see each other in a new light, to have empathy, to recognize that for all our diversity, we are humans first. [...] That’s why all of the great conduits of perception, Buddha, Mohammad, Jesus, Lao Tzu, I would say all of them spoke to us in stories and poetry and metaphor because the nonlinear non-cerebral forms that are art speak on a different frequency, may generate a new energy that can jolt us open and penetrate our defenses. So that we can see and hear, what we may have been afraid of seeing and hearing. […] Stories, they really can change people. Campbell’s recognition of the fundamental role of story in myth caused his work to resonate with people in ways they weren’t always able to put into language, as myths are stories not always told in words but also in images, in motifs, and in food. In The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology, Campbell speaks of the priestcraft of art. He explains the lore of the greatest Capital city of Old Egypt can only be understood properly by recognizing that “those that developed it were a priesthood of practicing creative artists.” (91-92) Here, Campbell links the greatness of a society with the artistry of its creators, suggesting that the artists were not simply tradesmen but people of a divine calling, whose work and leadership transcended the lines between that which is beyond and the here and now. We live in a world in need of new stories – in need of better stories. We also need storytellers that understand the power of the tool they wield. An impactful story can cause oppressors to turn from their harmful ways. It can also unite people around a tyrant. It can end a season of torment and cause new life to bloom forth from stony ground. Our stories matter, and those gifted with the ability to tell them well hold great authority, they are part of a priesthood of practicing creative artists, and they have the skills to craft the lore of our culture or completely destroy it.

Once, a very long time ago, the Buddha preached a sermon to his followers by saying nothing at all. Instead of speaking, he held up a single flower. Only one listener, a monk named Mahakasyapa, heard what that flower had to say and smiled with joy. (Joseph Campbell. The Masks of God, Vol. II: Oriental Mythology, 608) Everyone else seems to have missed the point of what has since come to be called the Flower Sermon, no doubt returning to their chores and meditation with some chagrin. Because, come on—a flower? What could Mahakasyapa possibly have seen in a single blossom? Or heard? Or...whatever? The question is still worth asking today. One possibility is that he perceived something related to the intricate Buddhist teaching of the Flower Garland, which Campbell summarizes succinctly: “one is all and all are one” (679). In other words, we are inseparable from each other; and I do mean “we” in the broadest possible sense. The Flower Garland goes far beyond the platitude “we are all connected.” This teaching asserts that we all arise from and remain one with a single, indivisible continuity. All existence—meaning all energy, all matter, all beings, all consciousness—is defined by inseparability, which is another way of saying we are defined by our unity, and there is no such thing as a separate self. In other words, “I” don’t exist without “you,” and neither of “us” exists without the All that gives rise to our experience of illusory and temporary separateness. Beneath what we normally think of as our “selves” exists the vibrant, continuous All, an energy field that imagines us up the same way it imagines up a flower out of stems, leaves, seeds, soil, and all the lives that fed that churning loam throughout the ages, leading up to that singe bloom. On the other hand, maybe Mahakasyapa saw an archetypal Blossom, meaning the larger-than-life “force that through the green fuse drives the flower,” as the poet Dylan Thomas calls it. Maybe the Buddha’s flower became transparent to the divine Flowering that moves through us all, that power beyond our own that can make us smile no matter what in spite of ourselves. That Smile, like Mahakasyapa’s, brings us directly to the lotus throne of the goddess who Campbell calls “the most prominent single figure in the ornamentation of all the early Buddhist monuments,” Lakshmi, whose imagery of beauty and wealth overflows with lotus flowers. (Oriental Mythology, 415) Lakshmi is, in effect, the great Bloom: she is the soul of the lotus, the love of blooming, the ability to blossom. She brightens, lightens, en-lightens. She is the consciousness of flowering, and she is the flowering of consciousness. Lakshmi is the flowers that fountain around her. She is the profligate abundance of the universe, dispensing glories of many kinds. Hearkening back to the teaching of the Flower Garland, Lakshmi reminds us of our own lotus-essence, because if we really are all one, then our consciousness is inseparable from hers. Perhaps when the Buddha held her aloft for all to see, she smiled directly into and through Mahakasyapa. Beyond mythic images and religious teachings, isn’t every bloom a blessing in and of itself? A flower is a gift, a grace, a healing. A blossom is an epiphanic reminder of beauty’s inevitability. Simultaneously tiny and profound, each flower holds a revelation. Before that flower, its blossom was impossible to imagine. But when those petals unfurled, the world changed. Where there had been nothing, now exists a rose, or an orchid, or a lotus, or new hope. Maybe Mahakasyapa marveled: how could this miracle exist? And yet it so manifestly is, how could it not exist? Then the flower’s presence could have opened his heart by collapsing the binaries of being and non-being, reminding him of his own miraculous presence and the presence of all things. Flowers tend to appear in the moments when our hearts are most full: first dates, apologies, weddings, hospital rooms, springtime. Flowers might not speak, but they most certainly proclaim. They herald spring’s return to a frozen landscape, peace to the battlefield, beauty to bleakness, healing to illness and injury. Flowers trumpet the news of the soul’s open heart, the world’s open heart, and the open heart of the cosmos itself. A single flower changed Mahakasyapa’s consciousness, and then, the consciousness of the entire tradition of Buddhism, and therefore the world. Like Lakshmi, his flower consciousness blossomed out of the mud and into the flamboyant generosity of nectar and fragrance that draws pollinators from miles around, and then, like Lakshmi’s, his smile became the truth of beauty and the beauty of truth.

This month in the MythBlast Series, we’re focusing on Joseph Campbell’s Masks of God, Vol II: Oriental Mythology. On page 490 of that volume, Campbell quotes from “The Song of the Cowherd” by the poet Jayadeva: “Oh may this poem…delight all lover’s hearts.” The poet and artist Lawrence Ferlinghetti, who delighted the hearts of all lovers (and delighted the lovers of great hearts, too), died on February 22, 2021. He’s already been eulogized in a multitude of ways, and with language that far exceed any bon mots that I might muster, but I do want to consider something he said in The New York Times “Last Word” feature of the online obituaries section because when I heard it, it rang in my soul like a bell. “Last Word” is a series of short on-camera interviews featuring prominent figures reflecting upon their own lives that are only released with the individual’s obituary. Ferlinghetti’s piece was extraordinarily intimate, and allows one to witness the intelligence, the heartfulness, the passions, and the sensitivities of a man who managed to forge his life in the flames of creativity and courage. In this video, Ferlinghetti tells us his early life was “unhappy,” and remarks, “so I escaped by lyricism.” He goes on to say, “When present day life gets too awful, there’s the lyric escape.” Ferlinghetti follows up with a few examples of the lyric escape, such as writing a poem, looking at the moon, or even “shacking up with your best girlfriend,” but what I hear resounding in his words is that the lyric escape is a flight into beauty. And it’s not just any beauty, it’s the beauty found within. As Campbell puts it: “[T]he sphere of eternity, beyond the veil of time and space, where there is no duality, they are at one; death and life are at one; all is peace.” (Oriental Mythology 121) It is an “enchanted mood,” Herman Melville insists, in which “thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.” (Moby Dick 251) (As an aside, Melville is referring to the Archbishop of Canterbury, Thomas Cranmer, who was ordered by Queen Mary to be put to death on March 21, 1556 by burning.) Both Campbell’s sphere of eternity and Melville’s enchanted mood refer to the aesthetic arrest by which one is overcome in the presence of deep beauty. That aesthetic arrest is Ferlinghetti’s lyric escape. Ferlinghetti seems to know that lyric beauty—the goal of the lyric escape, is the antidote to life’s pain. Readers of Joseph Campbell will be familiar with his discussions regarding James Joyce’s theory of art, in which proper art induces in the beholder a seizure of the heart, an aesthetic arrest. I’ve always thought Joyce’s seizure of the heart to involve at least some small degree of pain, a cardiac event induced by an intense psychological experience. People end up in ER exam rooms for similar reasons all the time. Perhaps, because we discover some modicum of pain in the experience of it, beauty has a salutary, restorative effect when we find ourselves in the grip of life’s pain. Beauty functions as a homeopathic remedy for the pain of living; it’s the healing alchemy of like curing like. Beauty, as Rilke puts it, is “the beginning of terror;” we know we must eventually take our leave of “this earth of majesty, this blessed plot,” this place where piercing beauty makes its home, and either it or ourselves will eventually turn to ashes. In his beguilingly titled book Essays in Idleness, the 14th century Zen monk-poet Yoshida Kenko captures the essential impermanence of beauty in a poignant, elegant meditation: If we lived forever, never to vanish like the dews of Adashino, never to fade like the crematory smoke on Toribeyama, men would scarcely feel the beauty of things. Containing both gratification and pain, beauty transcends dualities and remains, not only beyond the veil of time and space, but beyond pleasure and pain, beyond joy and sorrow, beyond life and death, within the sphere of eternity. The lyric escape transformed Dante’s pain of exile into the Divina Commedia, the Divine Comedy. The same year he was diagnosed with tuberculosis, Keats’ lyric escape created “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” a lyric flight that allowed him to live for a precious while within a timeless, ever-green scene etched on an ancient urn where young lovers loved forever, leaves never fell from trees, and he remained “the foster child of silence and slow time.” In bed after yet another bout with influenza and brittle mental health, Virginia Woolf’s lyric escape writes herself out of infirmity with an archly beautiful essay, “On Being Ill.” Lying there, she imagines herself a deserter from “the army of the upright,” looking up to see the “extraordinary” and “strangely overcoming” spectacle of the “divinely beautiful” and “also divinely heartless” sky that healthy, perpendicular people seldom notice. “With the hook of life still in us still we must wriggle,” Woolf writes. “Left to ourselves we speculate thus carnally. We need the poets to imagine for us. The duty of Heaven-making should be attached to the office of Poet Laureate.” Perhaps so; I’d like to think I’d feel at home in Billy Collins’ or Elizabeth Bishop’s heaven. But the duty of heaven making unfailingly falls to each one of us, and it’s a duty made lighter if we learn the art of the lyric escape.  After all, as Ferlinghetti wrote in Poetry as Insurgent Art, “the greatest poem is lyric life itself.”

Some have confused a mythology as nothing more than an elegantly-packaged ideology. Not so. Nor is it true to say that mythic figures are to be read as literal facts. The confusion commonly stems, as Campbell often repeated in his writings, from assuming that something or someone is literal, not metaphorical of another reality that invites the imagination into a world of multiple possibilities. Such a move towards literalism belittles the universal appeal and power of the mythic images to no more than “prosaic reification” (The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion, xxiv). Making the shift from literal to figural alters one’s entire perception of the phenomenal world, to say nothing of its opening one to the symbolic power of dreams. I can only speculate here as to why this confusion arises. I think one answer may be found in Adolf Bastian’s brilliant understanding of “elementary ideas” and “ethnic ideas.” The former transports us into the rich arena of archetypal images and situations; the latter into the particular  historical and specific ways that such universal realities are embedded in and flourish in a particular culture of a people. A brief example may suffice to unfold such a distinction. In their book Your Mythic Journey, Sam Keen and Anne Valley-Fox offer that “a myth can make a cow sacred in one culture and hamburger meat in another” (xi). Same animal. One cultural myth perceives it as sacred, the other reaches for it in an act of consumption. The animal’s universality is bent to conform or to support a local ethnic belief. Beef as belief. Animal as anima. Billions of burgers served. Campbell was keen to see that myths provide a dual vision: the transcendent and universal, but rooted firmly in history’s particularity. Such a belief allowed him to retrieve an ancient idea that it was the human body itself,  “in miniature a duplicate of that macrocosmic form,” (13) which conveyed a sense of unity through the great chain of being’s diversity. Correspondence and correlation are the lenses through which to uncover and further this ancient wisdom of analogies linking all diverse parts of creation. Such connective tissue is heightened when we are invited to gaze at a photo of the Earthrise taken from the moon’s surface (Inner Reaches, 19) to reveal that a new cosmological perspective insists on and incites a revisioned mythology. I believe such a miraculous image accelerated our concern for saving the planet by seeing it with all the boundaries of countries removed. Such a dramatic photo struck Campbell as a vision of a new myth. It also reveals his own mythopoetic way of discovering analogies that reveal relationships we might miss or ignore without his acute insights. He explores patterns closer to home–for example, between native American people and those of India–sensing “equivalences” in their images and beliefs. His method is “to identify these universals. . . archetypes of the unconscious and as far as possible, to interpret them” (69). Let’s pause to suggest here that the act of interpretation is a mythic move of imagination. Hermes is the god-guide in this human activity and hermeneutics therefore is a god-inspired talent. Without this rich act of being human, and Campbell is one of the most cogent minds in such an uncovering, we would stack up event-after-event with no cohering sense growing from such a futile performance. Interpretation is a fundamental act in learning. As he creates a unique form of such meaning-making, Campbell uncovers “an implicit connotation through all its metaphorical imagery of a sense of identity of some kind, transcendent of appearances, which unites behind the scenes the opposed actors on the world stage” (81). Life itself is dramatic, but to miss the experience because of an obsession with meaning is to miss the action that is before us and within us. Art in all of its guises becomes the delivery system by which myth, history and aesthetics congeal on the same stage. But as is his habitus of finding correlations between worlds, he suggests that “the mystic and the way of the proper artist are related” (111). I do not think it is too much to proclaim that all art is metaphorical to a large degree; Campbell’s own language is that the figural realities on the stage of artistic creation can succeed in opening us to “ a transformation of perspective” (109). Like that magnificent image of the Earthrise, the power of aesthesis, a showing forth or an unveiling, is the artist’s sacred inspiration for expression. The artist’s creation provides us with a mimetic reality, a way to activate our sense of analogy to recover our own mythic imagining, to see “with two eyes, and alone to him is the center revealed: that still point. . . (117). Draw a circle around the still point. Now you are at the center of it all.

Art, among other things, is image-making. As a teacher of creative writing, I often emphasize the power of images due to their effectiveness in rendering experiences in our readers. Concrete language, which communicates to (and through) the senses, is what drives the written image. Concrete language is direct, visceral, and needs no explanation to work its magic. Abstract language, on the other hand, is conceptual. Like the image, it too renders experience, though in a different way. I ask, then: Is the experience-rendering value of abstract language any less potent or significant due to this difference? And even more to the point, is not abstract language, in its own way, concrete? After all, a concept or emotion or experience is, in fact, something. And by “something” I mean to say some thing .  This idea is applicable not just to creative writing but to all genres of art whose works extend into this kind of subtler “stuff.” This MythBlast aims to highlight the experience-numinosity connection by attending to the attributes of our experiences—be they emotions, sensations, or insights—as concrete or material phenomena, each unique and wholly its own.  In the third chapter of his Inner Reaches of Outer Space , Joseph Campbell opens with a wonderful quote from his wife, Jean Erdman, whose art (and profession) was dance. She says, “The way of the mystic and the way of the artist are related, except that the mystic doesn’t have a craft” (89). Indeed. Whereas the artist attends more to making, the mystic’s focus attends more to matters of experience. And where the artist produces a tangible work, the mystic produces an experience that is (in our approach) very much less tangible. Nonetheless, the world of the artist and the world of the mystic both lean into that numinous, mysterious realm that we thinkers circumambulate with terms like Source, the Transcendent, God, etc. But if we apply our concrete approach, we could say that the mystic does in fact work with and upon “stuff.” In the supplies cache of the artist we find clay, paint, and so on—all overtly substantial. Ask a mystic what he’s packing and, if we’re lucky, he’ll pull out a few of those less-substantial things for display: “Well, here’s a mantra, that thing there’s a breathing technique. Oh, and here’s a twenty-eight-day fast I picked up at a shop in one of my visions.” So, along this scale of substantiality, the dancer’s body spills into movement, the musician’s instrument sheds its sound waves, and the meagre wisps of the poet’s ink seep into meaning. Each of these evoke experiences of particular flavors—i.e., attributes—depending on the art and on the consciousness of the observer.  For all the known reasons I could suggest (and even moreso, for all the unknown reasons I cannot!), the works of the artist and mystic reach into the numinous–but I think they also invite it. In our approach, we see that both have their “objects” of transmission—“stuff” with attributes. Whether it’s the cold depth of a statue’s empty gaze or the beaming crescendos of those van Gogh sunflowers, radiant and riotous like a choir of—well, sunflowers!—the experience pours through and saturates the psyche with (in this case) warmth, vitality, and celebration through paint, whose attributes are colors, whose attributes are pleasant, whose attributes are a kind of experience.  That’s one direction. The other direction is simply that the numinosity infuses all of these stages with, uh, itself. Whether we approach the direction from left to right or right to left, inner to outer or outer to inner, the substance of the attributes–regardless of where they fall on our materiality scale–both transmit and buffer the numinous force, which in its undiluted status must be, from the perspective of an embodied human, annihilatory in either a very good or very bad way. Campbell addresses this dynamic when he refers to the many characters in Ovid’s Metamorphoses who were “unfavorably transformed by encounters with divinities, the full blast of whose light they were unready to absorb.” And he later writes that “in contrast, the mystic deliberately offers himself to the blast.” (91) The divinities of mythology are archetypal (which we perceive and experience as attributes of forms that are nearer to the numinous, or more infused by it). Like a work of art or a mystic’s subtle medium, they take on this ambiguous function of pipelining numinous energy through their form. Or, with their form, they preserve us from the blast.  Speaking of blasts, even if this MythBlast is naught but guesswork, there may be some accurate content herein—or, at least, some moments where the guesswork brushes shoulders with truth. And if so, then it is encouraging to me to reflect on the business of engaging art as creations of our own making, and of our own being, that roam the frontier of the numinous, transmitting and receiving, to and fro, the missives of human to Source and of Source to human, composed in a language for which there can be no name.