The Role of Story in Crafting New Beginnings for Our Lives Most attribute the foundations of Western story structure to Aristotle. His simple idea that stories should have a beginning, a middle, and an end has long served as the template for how narratives have been communicated. Joseph Campbell, by contrast, wisely popularized the idea that the narrative journey was actually a cycle — that every ending brought forth new beginnings, that every death brought forth resurrection and new life. Growing up in East Texas, our family participated in the cultural ritual of composting. For the uninitiated, composting involves the return of food scraps and other organic disposables to the earth. Compost piles look disgusting to the untrained eye. They are a mass of rot and decay covered by insects and scavengers that manage to find something useful from what has been discarded. While the process of composting is the very picture of death, it is also essential to bringing forth and maintaining the ecosystem of life. The insects that feed on the rotting food become food themselves for birds and other animals who become food for other creatures further up the food chain. The cycle of death and resurrection continues. What is not consumed by the animals becomes fertilizer for other plants, which also becomes food for animals and humans alike. From death comes life. From what has passed, a new story emerges. Many of us are considering new beginnings in this first month of 2019. Too often, we imagine these beginnings as emerging from a blank slate. Most frequently, however, new beginnings are actually the reemergence of seeds that had long ago fallen to their death and been buried beneath the surface. Similarly, our stories move from ending celebrations to new initiations, eventually directing us toward a final ending for our own stories . . . Or is it? In the introduction to Mythic Worlds, Modern Words: Joseph Campbell on the Art of James Joyce, Campbell considers a curious Latin phrase that Joyce opens with from A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: “et ignotas animum dimittit in artes.” The phrase refers to Daedalus and is taken from Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Book 8, Line 188). Campbell tells us it is translated, “. . . and he turns his mind to unknown arts” (Mythic Worlds, 11). He goes on to remind us that Daedalus was the master craftsman that fashioned the labyrinth. In Metamorphoses, we learn he turned his mind to unknown arts and crafted wax wings that allowed him to fly away from Crete and the firm hand of King Minos. Theorists have offered a number of different ideas about what Ovid might have been getting at with the phrase “unknown arts.” Does unknown, in this case, refer to Daedalus’ choice to learn a new artform he wasn’t already proficient at? He learned a craft unknown to him in order to construct his wings. We could say, he learned to tell a new story. Campbell laments the fact that most conversations about the flight of the artist tend to center on Daedalus’s son, Icarus, and ignore him altogether, since in many ways, where Icarus failed, Daedalus succeeded. Campbell concludes by theorizing that Joyce referenced the Latin phrase because at heart he was an optimist who believed in “the capacity of a competent artist to achieve release” (Mythic Worlds, 11). We find story at the core of every art form, both known and unknown to us. Storytelling empowers us to charge into the cyclical patterns of our own life, believing that a better chapter may be waiting on the other side of the darkness. Where a previous year might have brought struggle, heartbreak, or even tragedy, an inherent drive within us draws our eyes toward the horizon and causes us to consider the possibilities that may lie beyond the horizon if we can stir up the courage to craft new wings and fly towards it. Perhaps there is new release waiting, as Campbell and Joyce believed. Perhaps there are unseen allies, mentors, and strategic partners just around the bend in our journey, if we only turn our mind to unknown arts and rise to believe what might be possible in the new beginning we just collectively experienced. Many of us long for a new story— a better story—in this new year. May we rise together, finding fresh narratives, enchanting opportunities, and the tools to craft new wings. Thank you for reading,

I recently had the pleasure of reading Michelle Obama’s Becoming—a story, eponymously, about Michelle’s “becoming,” grateful for the accessibility of an autobiography that models the unfolding nature of finding one’s purpose. I think how different the experience of this text is from the one my father gave me as a teenager: James Joyce’s Ulysses. Nothing was accessible about Ulysses. It took me until I was Odysseus’ age to finally understand that Ulysses, like Michelle’s story, is also about becoming. Except the metaphor Ulysses employs is the familiar motif of western becoming stories, popular since the Hebrew Bible and the Homeric epics: fathers and sons. Sons become fathers. And fathers, midway through life, when they have forgotten their younger selves, need sons, so that they can become mentors. My key to understanding Ulysses lay in Joseph Campbell’s explications, primarily in his lectures. I began to see that perhaps the whole point of wrestling with Joyce was learning how to read comparatively. That the difficulty of the text was in fact the test of my initiation into an artist-as-intellectual. This ideal was instilled in me by my genius composer of a father. It was to be achieved through a reading of the greats: Homer, Dante, Shakespeare, Joyce. I’d slept in Dad’s floor-to-ceiling library as a teenager dreaming that one day, I’d be as well-read. In retrospect, all that reading was about me looking to connect to my father, Fred Myrow — just like Stephen Daedalus and Telemachus before me. But Ulysses held a special place for Dad. Two decades before I took on Joyce, Jim Morrison, the rock icon of the 1960’s, also sought to connect to my father, and did so through Ulysses. In 1969, Jim was on the top of the rock world and Dad on the top of classical world as composer in residence at the New York Philharmonic under Leonard Bernstein. When they met, Jim told Dad that if he didn’t “find some way to transform, all he’d be good for was nostalgia.” Both Jim and my dad were inhabiting a kind of a wasteland fashioned from somebody else’s vision of success, causing them to suffer like the Grail King. Seeing in one another the living myth of the artist-as-intellectual, they decided to collaborate. Jim and Dad dreamed up a Wagnerian vision of the Gesamptwerke, the total art work, in a rock opera. But first Jim had to read up, in order to catch up to my Dad. When Dad left for Ireland for 6 months to score a film, Jim sublet Dad’s house to read through his library. At the end of it, Jim came to Dad with Ulysses. They would tell the story again for our time: a Vietnam Vet travels through a night-time Los Angeles odyssey. Jim’s last meeting in the States was with Dad on this project, before he left for Paris, right before he died. The unfinished project haunted Dad. I picked up writing the libretto with Dad just before he, like Jim, unexpectedly died. The difference between Dad and Jim wielding a revisioning of Ulysses and me was that I used Campbell’s tools and tricks as a way in.  Through Campbell I understood that the theme Jim and Dad wanted to take on was really about their own becoming and getting stuck along the way. My surprising insight into my father and Jim was that they didn’t seem to have understood the myth they were living. And I wondered if you need to see the patterns of your myth to tell your story. I didn’t know anything back then about what it feels like to be in the middle of your life and lost. When I finally did hit that point, I knew exactly what it was because I’d read about it and even tried to write about it for Dad and Jim. That’s when the metaphors of ten-year odysseys, shipwrecks on islands of shadow lives where the only thing you can do is story-tell about past adventures, became my living myth. That’s when I discovered the only way through the crises at the center of our lives is to tell our stories so that our past experiences make sense. This is the story Michelle tells, Joyce tells and Campbell explicates. It is the story of living myth that you, too are living, as you go about your becoming You.

This month, the first month of the new year, we begin again; and beginning again is, in fact, our theme for January at JCF. No doubt we’ll soon be inundated by numberless lists extolling the best and worst of the year just past, predictions for the coming year, and resolutions for change that will become causes of fleeting and somewhat rueful) self-judgment by March. The new year arrives, as it always does, its monthly waves beating against the shoals of our lives, and we collectively carry on, content to limit the erosion and not to be entirely washed away. Generally, people don’t ask why they live as they do—at least they don’t ask why with genuine curiosity. Why, if it is uttered at all, is uttered as a lament. In the play The Man of La Mancha, Miguel de Cervantes says the men he saw die, …died despairing. No glory, no brave last words, only their eyes, filled with confusion, questioning ‘Why?’ I don’t think they were asking why they were dying, but why they had ever lived. When life itself seems lunatic, who knows where madness lies? Perhaps to be too practical is madness. To surrender dreams—this may be madness. (The Man of La Mancha). Perhaps “Why?” is entirely the wrong question to be asking. The important question to ask is, “Who?” Who am I? Who am I told to be? Who will I be tomorrow, ten years from now, or who will I be when I die? Who do I want to be? Who is it within me that aspires, dreams, creates, laughs, weeps, and loves? Searching for answers to similar questions, C.G. Jung once asked himself, “But then what is your myth—the myth in which you do live?” (Memories, Dreams and Reflections) Joseph Campbell said that Jung regarded the discovery of the answer to this question as the task of all tasks, and the exploration of that question is why Campbell liked to spend his birthdays at the Esalen Institute in California, once remarking, “That’s what a birthday is for, and that’s what Esalen is about” (jcforg.kinsta.cloud). After his death, his friends continued to gather at Esalen for what they called “Campbell Week,” a tradition that has since evolved into a “play shop” called Revisioning Your Hero’s Journey®: A Mythological Toolbox, which will be held this year at Esalen the week of March 24-29, 2019. The play shop is led by Joseph Campbell Foundation President, Bob Walter. Bob is a theatrical playwright and director, an educator, a publisher, and he was Joseph Campbell’s friend and editor for over a decade. Through a range of deceptively playful exercises, participants remember and explore significant life events, and discover how the mythologizing of those events organize one’s own life narrative. Bob’s masterly facilitation of the exercises he’s honed over years of practice allows one to realize that one’s life isn’t accidental, it isn’t the result of some sort of supernaturally assigned destiny. Rather, he self is formed from a mythologized narrative woven together from the constellations of biological and environmental manifestations, social learning, and personal perspectives. Inescapably, we are the protagonists in our own narratives, the heroes of our own, personal mythology. The hero is the metaphor of self-discovery, struggling with inner demons and monsters, bringing the light of consciousness to inner darkness, trying to understand the forces that shaped and made one a self, a whole human being. Engaging with such a task, the larger realization always begins to dawn on us that in order to be truly heroic, the rewards of heroism—its boons, its knowledge, its gifts—must somehow be shared with one’s larger community. True heroism does not result simply in personal gain, it generates communitas, a transformative cultural moment that elevates and values community members equally. Communitas is a powerful force that, as Aeschylus put it, makes gentle the life of this world. As the Toolbox week progresses one realizes that one’s group has been transformed into a communitas, a small, supportive, transformative commonwealth that serves to connect one not only to others in the group, but to one’s deeper values and ideals, to our humanity itself. We have it in our power to begin our world again; we have the power to recreate, to gleefully, heedless of the old order and convention, rewrite the mythology of ourselves. This is what one may find in the Mythological Toolbox, a new world and a new self, hiding in plain sight, and just waiting for the emerging, experienced craftsman of the self, with the proper vision and tools to set it in bold and beautiful relief.

The winter solstice approaches and soon the sun’s course will reach its lowest noon altitude and its shortest day, marking both the end and beginning of another solar year. Hence, this day aligns itself with transmutation, with endings and beginnings, with death and rebirth, both metaphorically and physically. Among other things, the sun is a symbol for consciousness because its light reveals what otherwise would not come to be known. Jungian psychology holds that the conscious attitude which the ego adopts toward life is arguably the chief component to psychological adaptation. And so I sat for some time, considering what would be a valuable direction or attitude through which to point the light of one’s conscious attention—and especially during a time when the process of new beginnings is being supported and enacted by the local cosmos. I eventually concluded that quality of life is a worthy direction—simply to live life well. Not so long ago I’d have called this the goal. But then I encountered Chogyam Trungpa’s liberating insight “The path is the goal.” This simple reminder steers one away from the future—from a concept which, true to its name, remains ever in the future. Whereas this very uncomplicated phrase speaks to training one’s attention on the constant (and indeed, inescapable) realm of the present—the eternal moment which is hardly a moment but rather a field in which the expressions of existence emerge, dissolve, and reemerge in a play of apparently ceaseless transmutation.  In this context, time can be defined as a conceptual invention that tracks transmutation through the field of the now. Living well is therefore a practice which can be accomplished at this very moment and only at this very moment. To the point at hand, the winter solstice is a relatively consistent event that rises and dissolves in a transmutation we label December 21st. The metaphysical nature and value of this event is aptly addressed in Joseph Campbell’s The Inner Reaches of Outer Space: Metaphor as Myth and as Religion. In brief, “outer space” denotes the dimension of matter—the tangible environment of physical reality we naturally perceive as outside ourselves; whereas “inner space” denotes the dimension of psyche—the subjective reality of interior experiences like gnosis, emotion, and meaning. Their interplay lays the foundations of human experience. Depending on one’s method of approach—that is, the hermeneutic and attitude one chooses to employ—personal and collective experience take on different levels of value and depth. Metaphor is a highly effective hermeneutic — a tool for unlocking communication and understanding — because it brings the outer and inner into relationship, translating outer phenomena into inner experience while simultaneously substantiating inner experience in the form of images. Or, to put it another way, image is the wardrobe of the immaterial—of energies, concepts, archetypes, emotions, psychological structures, and so forth. It is therefore fitting that Campbell opens his book with descriptive macrocosmic imagery: the stars and galaxies in which we somehow find ourselves, the Big Bang which brought forth, from infinite energetic density, substance. And all these are describing, through metaphor, the depth and vastness of the interior of the human psyche. The first observation in alchemical literature describes this relationship and comes to us from Hermes Trismegistus’ Tabula Smaragdina (The Emerald Tablet): “That which is below is like to that which is above & that which is above is like that which is below to do the miracles of one only thing.” Surely, Campbell’s description of the universe addresses a much larger scale than does the winter solstice, but the metaphors remain consistent and true. Of course some readers may have better ideas for transmutations that are more valuable or appropriate than the one I came up with. For that is a matter of personal preference. What is of greatest importance is that there is a macrocosmic event that can help to precipitate and support through metaphor and natural law whatever it is one wishes to transmute in their own life. And for this author, living life well sounds like a worthwhile endeavor, to be lifted through a joint effort between personal consciousness and the sun, into rebirth, and into the new year.

1986 saw the publication of three seminal books: The Society of Mind by MIT cognitive scientist Marvin Minsky, On the Plurality of Worlds by philosopher David Lewis, and The Inner Reaches of Outer Space by mythologist Joseph Campbell. In their respective fields, each was grappling with what is commonly referred to as the problem of the One and the Many. Minsky, on the one hand, turned inward to come away with the theory that intelligence emerges from the cooperation of basic units, or agents, working in concert but also propagating a myth of a centralized Self: But if there is no single, central, ruling Self inside the mind, what makes us feel so sure that one exists? What gives that myth its force and strength? A paradox: perhaps it's because there are no persons in our heads to make us do the things we want—nor even ones to make us want to want—that we construct the myth that we're inside ourselves. (Minsky, The Society of Mind 4.2) Lewis, on the other hand, looked outward and posited, “There are so many other worlds, in fact, that absolutely every way that a world could possibly be is a way that some world is” (On the Plurality of Worlds, 2). Last but not least, Joseph Campbell attempted a more holistic, Heracleitian approach, considering seemingly conflicting opposites—the inner and the outer—as sharing in a deeper harmony communing in Soul and in Myth: There is a beautiful saying of Novalis: “The seat of the soul is there, where the outer and the inner worlds meet.” That is the wonderland of myth. From the outer world the senses carry images to the mind, which do not become myth, however, until there transformed by the fusion with accordant insights, awakened as imagination from the inner world of the body. (Campbell, Inner Reaches 5) Campbell placed a unique emphasis on the role of this “inner world of the body” in the production of myths: “For myths and dreams...are motivated from a single psychophysiological source—namely, the human imagination moved by the conflicting urgencies of the organs (including the brain) of the human body” (Inner Reaches, xiv). In the thirty-two years since these ambitious books were published, we have become increasingly influenced by advanced technologies able to model and mime our minds, bodies, and myths—not to mention our notions of Self. When Campbell sought a primary mythic image for future neo-mythology (i.e. a “global” mythology), he looked no further than those first images from NASA of an Earthrise on the Moon’s horizon (Inner Reaches, 18, see Figure 2). Centuries prior, Cicero related in book six of his De re publica the account of Scipio’s celestial journey in which he looks back at Earth as a sphere. In our time, we have not only that same photo, but also an interactive model produced from satellite imagery assembled in the form of Google Earth. With the added bonus of recent breakthroughs in virtual reality technology, one can even walk the globe with VR headsets via Google Earth VR, experiencing a mundane mystic mirage marketed as a virtual apotheosis (Adario Strange, “Google Earth VR is the godlike virtual reality experience we’ve been waiting for”). Technocrats, technicians, and designers are our mythmakers. Today we live with an abundance of possible worlds and cosmologies. Our pluralistic era hosts fervent devotees espousing a flat earth on the one hand and philosophers like Nick Bostrom presenting a 1/3 probability that we are living in a simulated construct on the other. The fragmentation of a single world has given rise to pixeled worlds and partisan myths. To the mythologist, these are simply mutharia, mini-myths, looking for germinal material from which to grow. And yet the world itself, according to some traditions, was once fashioned from the body of an ancestral deity or primordial being. Ancient cultures mapped Mundi with divine matter. The Apostle Paul spoke of the cosmic body of Christ, “For just as we have many members in one body and all the members do not have the same function, so we, who are many, are one body in Christ, and individually members one of another” (Romans 12:4-5). During the month of December the ancient Romans celebrated Saturnalia, replete with merriment and societal role-reversal to mark, perhaps, a brief restoration of Saturn’s Golden Age: an abundant and blissful era when gods and humans mingled. Today, our Silicon Age promises a singular salvation via ensoulment in cyberspace. But we risk mistaking parts for wholes. We’re beyond metaphor and meeting metonymy. We can still heed Campbell’s words: ...consciousness thinks it’s running the shop. But it’s a secondary organ of a total human being, and it must not put itself in control. It must submit and serve the humanity of the body. (Campbell, Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, 181)

There is a saying attributed to Hermes Trismegistus: “As above, so below; as within, so without” (The Emerald Tablets of Thoth the Atlantean, p. 47). This means that whatever happens on any level of reality also happens on every other level—that the individual and the world (indeed, the universe), are holistically linked in the sense that each lies within the other.Through understanding one, we can understand the other. Such an understanding is one of the central themes in Joseph Campbell’s  The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, an utterly fascinating volume put together from lectures delivered in San Francisco over the years 1981-1984. These lectures explore the relationships between such subjects as myth, dreams, science, religion and metaphor, and human experiences in these domains. As Campbell puts it, “In other words […], outer space is within inasmuch as the laws of space are within us; outer and inner space are the same” (Inner Reaches, p. 2). This particular work of Campbell’s is fascinating because he passionately argues that literalism in the study of myth cannot account for anything remotely like an accurate understanding of the universe and the energies it contains, nor can it accurately account for why human beings experience the world as we do. One may read Campbell’s indictment of literalness in the study of myth as an indictment of a far more wide-ranging, hegemonic materialism, one that dogmatically pervades contemporary thought, offering the promise of definitive answers topped with certainty, served up in a generous container of self-satisfaction and reductionism, reifying what Erwin Schrodinger called the “spatio-temporal plurality of individuals.” Schrodinger finishes this comment by saying, “but it [the spatio-temporal plurality] is a false construction” (My View of the World, p. 30, ). In his exoteric discussion of scientific thought, Schrodinger asserts that all consciousness is one and cannot be spoken of in the plural. Campbell, however, turns to Arthur Schopenhauer to cite the influence of the same apparently single consciousness to which Schrodinger referred. Campbell likely preferred Schopenhauer for the simple fact that Schopenhauer “had established the prerequisites for a correlation of oriental and occidental metaphysical terms” (Inner Reaches, p. 82). The dart thrown by Asian mythology landed closest to the center of the great mythological message Campbell most valued, the transcendent experience he called “mythic identification.” It is a concept he returns to time and again in his work (he writes at length about it in his book, Myths of Light). Simply stated, the idea of mythic identification is that one understands oneself and the objects of religious awe, i.e. the gods, to be one and the same. In mythic identification, one directly identifies with the single consciousness giving rise to the spatio-temporal plurality of things and the accompanying illusion that there are many forms of consciousness. I’d like to think Campbell would have enjoyed the philosopher Thomas Nagel and his book, Mind & Cosmos. In this work, Nagel explores the possibility of imagining a “conception of the natural order very different from materialism—one that makes mind central, rather than a side effect of physical law” (Nagel, p. 13). In other words, consciousness itself may be the central organizing principle of the universe! As Nagel explains, it is consciousness, “rather than physical law, [which] provides the fundamental level of explanation of everything, including the explanation of the basic and universal physical laws themselves” (Nagel, p.21). What I like about Nagel’s book is his willingness to question the logical foundations of accepted facts and beliefs regarding human consciousness. An unquestioning acceptance of materialism is a logical mistake, as is its mirror opposite, theism. These poles of thought are both severely reductionistic in nature; they restrict and canalize thinking at the cost of creativity and novelty, insisting that there is only one form, only one way of understanding human existence, specifically, and universal existence, generally. Here Nagel and Campbell overlap: what Nagel calls reductionism, Campbell speaks to as literalization and concretization. When one can let go of reductionisms (or any kind of comforting attachments) and forsake the easy pleasures of epistemological certainty—that “which when seen pleases” (Inner Reaches, p. 101)—the ultimate consequence is that one is initiated into a radically reorienting, reordering experience of the sublime. By my lights, this is what Campbell was all about, the opening of oneself to the sublime, and this move makes Campbell’s work perpetually exciting and relevant. Joseph Campbell’s work, and in this instance, Nagel’s as well, reminds me of what Ludwig Wittgenstein wrote in his Tractatus: “We feel that even when all possible scientific questions have been answered, the problems of life remain completely untouched.” The answers to the problems of life lie beyond science and theology, the livable answers await discovery in one’s experience of the sublime. And Joseph Campbell was truly a virtuoso of the sublime.

W.H. Auden once remarked that a real book reads us, an observation that seems right enough to me, and certainly seems right to apply to the work of Joseph Campbell. After all, Campbell spent his life in conversation with the narratives—myths—that read and reflect us to ourselves, narratives that remind us that we are more than we realize, and that we all have access to the transcendent if we only remember that our thinking and language are metaphorical—remember that we, ourselves, are metaphors. Metaphors may be thought of as living things, active and animated; they are, in some enigmatic way, sentient. Metaphors are the figures of movement and of carrying across, of transport; public buses in Athens are called metaphora. The influence of metaphor is the métier of Campbell’s work. The importance of understanding metaphor simply cannot, to my mind, be overstated. In its absence a tyrannical literalness and concreteness overtakes language and living. To this point, I’m reminded of a couplet from a poem by W.B. Yeats: “We had fed the heart on fantasies/The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.” The hardened brutality of the heart is the result of taking the fantasies literally, since understood literally, they can only bring disappointment, heartache, and an inevitably hardened heart. Certainly, anyone reading this MythBlast has at least a passing familiarity with Joseph Campbell the mythologist, but it may surprise you to learn that, as a young man, Campbell wrote fiction and nursed the desire for a literary life. In a volume titled The Mythic Imagination, the Joseph Campbell Foundation has published a collection of seven short stories written by Campbell himself that experiment with different styles of writing and tackle a variety of themes, both modern and eternal. In fact, this essay takes its title from a single, offset sentence in an intriguing, strange, futuristic fantasy of a story, “The Forgotten Man.” Upon reflection, it shouldn’t be surprising that Campbell tried his hand at writing literature. It’s easy to see how much he loved it, and surely he understood that, as Lionel Trilling wrote, “anyone who thinks about modern literature in a systematic way takes for granted the great part played in it by myth, and especially by those examples of myth which tell about gods dying and being reborn […]” (“On the Teaching of Modern Literature,” The Moral Obligation to be Intelligent). I wonder if the young Campbell, struggling to publish his stories, recognized the great part myth played in them, and was therefore compelled to fully turn his attention to mythology. When you read this collection of short stories, you’ll find no shortage of mythic images and figures; you’ll also recognize the smart, meticulous writing of the Modernist era as well as the influences of Modernist masters like Joyce and Steinbeck. I believe that Campbell’s enduring popularity and influence continues because he was primarily focused on human potential, particularly the innate potential human beings have to glimpse the transcendent realm of existence (a realization which I wrote about in an earlier MythBlast this month called Tat Tvam Asi, or "Thou Art That"). Mythology was simply the vehicle (the metaphor, if you will) that got him there. More than literature alone could, myth itself provided Campbell with the material—historical, artistic, humanistic, philosophical, literary—and to no small degree (in his hands, anyway), the scientific means by which he could describe in great detail the incipient human capacity for transcendent experiences. Through his extensive research and analysis, he assured himself that the transcendence he wrote of was something more than mere self-delusion or personal fantasy. In the short fiction comprising The Mythic Imagination, one sees Campbell already wrestling with the larger issues and challenges of living a human life, the same issues he tackles more successfully in his later work in mythology. But always in his writing, whether in fiction or mythology, Campbell is searching for something original, something novel, and something sublime. Martin Amis asserts that “all writing is a campaign against cliché. Not just clichés of the pen but clichés of the mind and clichés of the heart” (The War Against Cliché: Essays and Reviews, 1971-2000, xv). In his writings on myth, Campbell successfully waged an ongoing war against cliché in all three of the theaters Amis identified: pen, mind, and heart. In fact, I still find myself in bewildered awe when I read him, and I never fail to be moved by his humanity, his compassion, curiosity, generosity of spirit and intellect, and his ability to clearly render with grace, with humor, and patient understanding, cogent critiques of the (mis)uses of mythology in addition to the splendidly noble, creative, and deeply beautiful rewards of being human.

As we move into the holidays, experiencing the passage of seasons, the weather shifts to a cooler disposition, the world darkens early, and the sun’s transit diminishes, foretelling the coming winter lull. We light the home fires, pull up the covers, and begin to accustom ourselves to the slower pace of things. This period is also marked by gatherings of friends and family in thanksgiving, meaningful celebrations of our various religious traditions, and a toast for the welcoming of a wonderful New Year. Okay, that’s one scenario; the one we imagine in the deeper recesses of our soul.  However, this season is also marked by a crush of holiday marketing filled with trivialized religious symbols that shine a harsh light on our culture’s obsession with consumerism. How did the universal symbol of the Tree become a meaningless altar for an overindulgent mass of presents? How did the deeper meaning behind our religious traditions become so diminished, usurped and enslaved to the excesses of our culture? The literalizing of religious metaphor. Though the move was unconscious, note how the gifts the magi brought to the baby Savior have become a mass of presents bestowed upon our own children. Talk about concretizing religious meaning! In Thou Art That, Joseph Campbell, reminds us, “All of our religious ideas are metaphors for a mystery. It is important to remember that if you mistake the denotation of the metaphor for its connotation, you completely miss the message contained in the symbol,”  and the mystery is lost (48). Our stories and symbols are reduced by the desire to “fix” them historically in space and time or to a single interpretation, thus denying us their awesome power to awaken our imaginations and move us to a transcendent experience. So how do we recover meaning?  Better, how do we recover the experience of meaning in our stories, symbols and traditions? Campbell helps us find our way, showing us how to reframe our approach to the religious metaphor; indeed, Thou Art That is devoted to this call. He states: …the primary purpose of a dynamic mythology, which we may underscore as its properly religious function, is to awaken and maintain in the person an experience of awe, humility, and respect in recognition of that ultimate mystery that transcends every name and form, “from which,” as we read in the Upaniṣads, “words turn back.” (13) The call is to shed ourselves of the need for fixed notions, black and white thinking; to get comfortable with ambiguity, with not knowing; and to open ourselves to the grand mystery that is life. To know that the mystery is us. While Campbell points out that God has become a fixed notion in the Judeo-Christian tradition, in other religious systems the notion of God is a metaphor for “that which we all are” (19). Where is God, he asks? Within you. He points to the Vedic Hindu notion, “Thou art that. Tat tvam asi” (20). This is the path to the transcendent experience. This is the way to move beyond (the meaning of the word “transcendent”) the stilted, concretized religious traditions that have taken hold today. Knowing ourselves as that Great Mystery orients our lives—and those of our fellow humans—to the sublime and calls on us to approach life with awe and reverence. The central idea in the Nichiren Buddhist tradition, which came out of Japan in the thirteenth century, is that Buddha is life itself.  Each of us is a unique expression of Buddhahood, our God-nature. Therefore we—and the entire world—are sacred. We should stand every day in the awesome knowledge of our own transcendent nature.  With this attitude, the bestowing of gifts during the holidays regains some of its original meaning: to honor the sacred divinity in each of us. Let’s approach our tables this Thanksgiving as though we are honoring that which we hold most sacred.  Let us see it in the face of our family and friends, the homeless at the food kitchen, and the children’s glee at the first snow.  For we, indeed, are that.

For every profession, there’s a question people ask that isn’t the real question. When I was an actor, the question audience members asked was, “How do you learn all those lines?” when what they really meant was, “How do you get so far inside of another person’s head that their words come out of your mouth?” When I transitioned to writing fiction, the question became, “Where do you get your ideas?” Now, I understand that readers who ask this think they’re actually asking the real question. But the real question? It’s “Where do stories come from?” It’s a question a lot of folks have thought about a lot — none of them harder than Joseph Campbell. If you wanted to boil Campbell’s life’s work down to a single line of inquiry (something I’m pretty sure he’d have objected to mightily), I think that would be it. Where do stories come from? Campbell would have said that they spring from the same source as myths and dreams — which is to say, the human unconscious. As he said in The Power of Myth, his wonderful interviews with Bill Moyers, They come from the imagination, don’t they? The imagination is grounded in the energy of the organs of the body, and these are the same in all human beings. Since imagination comes out of one biological ground, it is bound to produce certain themes. Dreams are dreams. There are certain characteristics of dreams that can be enumerated, no matter who is dreaming them” (49). So any artistic creation — from painting to poetry to dance to fiction writing — is an act of mythopoesis that brings what is deep within the artist and births it, squalling and screaming, into the light of the everyday world. “For nature, as we know, is at once without and within us. Art is the mirror at the interface. So too is ritual, so also myth. These, too, bring out ‘the grand lines of nature,’ and in doing so, re-establish us in our own deep truth, which is one with that of all being” (Joseph Campbell, The Inner Reaches of Outer Space, 101). It shouldn’t be surprising that Joseph Campbell, someone who spent his life contemplating the origins and lineaments of narrative, should himself have explored the art of fiction writing. Nor should it be a surprise that the stories that he produced were, at their hearts, explicitly mythic explorations of moments when the mortal world met the eternal. During the first four decades of his life, Campbell dedicated himself to creating fiction — almost entirely short stories and novellas. Although only one of his stories was ever accepted for publication, this great student of myth himself engaged in many — probably dozens — of acts of mythopoesis. Unfortunately, only a few of those survive. In 2012, I worked with JCF President Robert Walter (who had served as Campbell’s editor through the last decade of the mythologist’s life) to bring out the seven of Campbell’s stories that still existed in Mythic Imagination: Collected Short Fiction. It was humbling and exciting to work on these explorations of mythic themes in modern settings. In each story, most of which were written in the years preceding the publication of The Hero with a Thousand Faces, a very human protagonist receives a call to adventure, comes into contact with some ineffable force, and is either transformed or destroyed by the experience. A romantic Hawaiian debutante encounters the Buddha. A cynical GI enters an earthly paradise. A young farmhand discovers one of the now-it’s-there-now-it’s-not fairy houses of the sidhe. Metamorphoses for the modern world. As Bob pointed out, the stories eerily anticipated the Magical Realism of Bórges and García-Marquéz with its blending of the metaphysical and the mundane. Mythic Imagination serves as a fascinating porthole into Campbell’s mind as he was exploring the very ideas that would become the basis for his better known non-fiction. The stories are also terrific, thought-provoking tales by a man who was himself a great storyteller. So where do stories come from? With Campbell, I have to say they flow from “the secret opening through which the inexhaustible energies of the cosmos pour into human cultural manifestation” (The Hero with a Thousand Faces,1). And in Mythic Imagination, we get to see Campbell himself tapping into that inexhaustible flow.

For the month of November, we at the Joseph Campbell Foundation are exploring the theme of blessings. The comfortable blessings of bounty, family, and health are certainly likely to spring to mind, but there are difficult blessings, too. And these difficult blessings are often found in the deepest, most fundamental, and most challenging human experiences: the fact that consciousness and self-conflict are invariably bound together, our questions about what constitutes reality, and the unfathomably mysterious connection we have with other human beings. Opening to human connection may inspire a spiritual revelation that Campbell identified as tat tvam asi, Sanskrit for "Thou art that." Campbell’s conversational, engagingly lucid book by the same name, Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor, is the text influencing my thoughts just now. In this book Campbell challenges the notion, present in the Judeo-Christian tradition, that individuals are restricted to a relationship with God that is characterized by separateness and otherness. Campbell insists that the god and the human being who is contemplating god are one: “In any of the orthodox biblical traditions, one cannot identify oneself with God. Jesus identified himself with God in this sense. But God is a metaphor, as he also is a metaphor for that which we all are” (Thou Art That, p. 24). In Thou Art That,Campbell places in bold relief the deep mythological and symbolic meanings of the Judeo-Christian tradition, and illustrates that the individual and the object of religious awe are one and the same. In its ideal manifestation, the heart of the Christian tradition is compassion. The image of the suffering Christ on the cross—the central image of the entire Christian enterprise, is meant to call forth compassion in the observer, to awaken the metaphysical revelation that the “other” is not some stranger in whom I have no connection and no vested interest, but rather is a person—and here Campbell refers to Arthur Schopenhauer—“in whom I suffer, in spite of the fact that his skin does not enfold my nerves” (Thou Art That, xii). It is, however, overly simplistic to say that because I know what my pain is, I can therefore know the pain of another. Compassion doesn’t rest on the assumption that the pain I feel is the pain of another. That would nullify the other’s experience of pain. Compassion always inspires curiosity, a singularly intimate characteristic of relationship. Where does it hurt? What caused your pain? What can I do? These are the questions curiosity is driven to satisfy once compassion is awakened. Once compassion has ignited curiosity, curiosity is naturally drawn to “whatsoever is grave and constant in human suffering,” and we are compelled to contemplate what Campbell calls “the key to the whole thing: the secret cause” (Thou Art That, p. 34). The secret cause is related to death, but the secret cause is not merely death. The secret cause is not even the manner or circumstance of one’s death, such as a car accident or a heart attack; those are merely the instrumental causes of one’s death. The secret cause of your death is your destiny. Every life has a limitation, and in challenging the limit you are bringing the limit closer to you, and the heroes are the ones who initiate their actions no matter what destiny may result. What happens is, therefore, a function of what the person does. This is true of life all the way through. Here is revealed the secret cause: your own life course is the secret cause of your death (Thou Art That, p. 35). Contemplation of one’s own secret cause necessarily means wrestling with questions of life and death, eternity, transcendence and, following the Christian metaphor of resurrection, the survival of consciousness after death. One discovers one’s “secret cause” retrospectively perhaps, through living a life spent following one’s bliss, a life lived saying yes to compassion, yes to joy, yes to suffering, yes to limitations, yes to the mystery, saying yes to everything one’s life conjures. Lived in this way, life can never be a mistake. Symbols of death and resurrection reflect the ongoing fundamental and fundamentally unremitting demands of human life: we must be constantly dying to the old ways of being and the old ways of thinking. Relinquishing obsolete beliefs, unhelpful habits, distorted perspectives while simultaneously awakening to new possibilities and new understandings is death and resurrection in the most vital sense. The seeds of rebirth are enclosed in catastrophe, they’re carried aloft in the trailing smoke of destruction and nestled in the salted earth of abandoned homesteads. The shattered dreams of the burdened and the broken may constellate a formidable renewal if one can summon a curious, consummate compassion while, simultaneously, living into the secret cause of our lives.

“Who was that Masked Man?" A childhood memory, televised in black and white––yet I still feel chills up my spine in anticipation of the weekly revelation, followed always by the sound of thundering hooves, the strains of the William Tell Overture, and a hearty "Hi Ho Silver, Away!" The power of the mask! We feel it even today, in our un-superstitious age. This ancient vehicle of identities and energies that transcend the individual is still worn among the pantheon populating contemporary childhood tales. The Lone Ranger, Zorro, Batman––each of these characters is more the mask than the man who wears it; individual identity dissolves beneath the disguise. Halloween masks play a similar role: when the doorbell rings and voices cry out "Trick or treat!" it is the monster, ghost, or witch we appease with sweet offerings. This quaint custom is more secular than religious in its observance, but its Celtic origins illustrate how masks have long provided a gateway to other dimensions, other realms beyond the senses. The phrase "the masks of God,” as used by Campbell, refers to the deities of the various mythological systems, whether Zeus, Indra, Isis, Yahweh, etc.et.al., as local manifestations of the divine, transcendent source of being: that which is beyond thought and conception, beyond the personality of particular cultural deities. Through one or another of these local gods, individuals are able to approach the greater Mystery. Campbell maintains that a god should be "transparent to transcendence,” opening up to the radiance behind the mask. For, indeed, in the primitive world, where most of the clues to the origin of mythology must be sought, the gods and demons are not conceived in the way of hard and fast, positive realities. A god can simultaneously be two or more places––like a melody, or like the form of a traditional mask. And whenever he comes, the impact of his presence is the same: it is not reduced through multiplication. (Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God, Volume I: Primitive Mythology, p. 21) In most cultures, wearing a mask in a sacred ceremony involves the adoption and channeling of energies that transcend the individual personality. For the space of the ceremony the individual disappears. Moreover, the mask in a primitive festival is revered and experienced as a veritable apparition of the mystical being that it represents––even though everyone knows that a man made a mask and that a man is wearing it. The one wearing it, furthermore, is identified with the god during the time of the ritual of which the mask is a part. He does not merely represent the god; he is the god. (ibid, p.21). From the masked Kachina dancers of the Pueblo peoples or the Hactin of the Apache, to the False Face Society of the Iroquois, the Yu'pik of the Arctic, the masked Duk-duk of New Guinea, and the indigenous tribes in West Africa and the Sudan, the mask serves as a conduit for the community to powers that transcend the individual. And the image still speaks to us today. It's a vital metaphor. In fact, Campbell spins our brains further by proposing the mask as a metaphor for metaphor itself! As he puts it,“[Metaphor] also suggests the actuality that hides behind the visible aspect. The metaphor is the mask of God through which eternity is to be experienced.” (Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers, p. 73) And what is metaphor? Well, what isn't? Campbell is fond of quoting Goethe: “Alles Vergängliche ist nur ein Gleichnis” (“Everything transitory [the entire phenomenal world and all its parts] is but a metaphor”). Schopenhauer, another Campbell favorite, expands on this thought: In all these phenomena the inner essence, that which manifests itself, that which appears, is one and the same thing standing out more and more distinctly. Accordingly, that which exhibits itself in a million forms of endless variety and diversity, and thus performs the most variegated and grotesque play without beginning and end is one essence. It is so closely concealed behind all these masks that it does not recognize itself again, and thus often treats itself harshly. (Arthur Schopenhauer, The World As Will and Representation, Volume II, p. 318) Each of us is one of these "million forms of endless variety and diversity"––which places in perspective a phrase mentioned above, introduced to Joseph Campbell by Karlfried Graf von Dürckheim: Deities have to become, as one great German scholar said, "transparent to the transcendent." The transcendent must show and shine through those deities. But it must shine through us, too, and through the spiritual things we are talking about. (Joseph Campbell with Michael Toms, An Open Life, p. 70) Well, what do you know! Turns out that we are the masks of God! Who is that Masked Man, indeed?

Let’s play a game of mental association. I say “Joseph Campbell.” You say, “Hero with a Thousand Faces.” If I ask, “Which of Campbell’s ideas is the most influential?” There’s a good chance you’ll say “the Hero’s Journey.” When I began story doctoring, I thought that too.  But it turns out Campbell’s Masks of God, Volume IV: Creative Mythology is what I actually use in practice. The frames in this book open up the mythic dimension for writers and students like a magic key. The big idea from Creative Mythology is the value of an authentic, individual experience. The method that allows us to put this idea into practice is one of comparative literature: identify how the story you are working to tell, (or the story you are living), is both a relevant mythic model, and a distinct narrative. This method is itself an iteration  of the Hero’s Journey that unlocks the possibility of working with your story in functional ways. Merely question your own story. Like Aladdin’s enchanted incantation, “Open Sesame!,” the conversation unlocks the mythic layer of your narrative. The journey through Campbell’s Creative Mythology is an exquisite unpacking of a moment in time: the medieval Renaissance, when the Western story of the Self emerged. Prior to the Renaissance, divine mysteries were thought to exist only within the confines of traditional theological systems. But with the dawning of this new era, we began to believe that these divine mysteries happen to us through ordinary experiences. When we experience ordinary moments authentically, the extraordinary comes through. Campbell believed that artists capture such irruptions in forms, and express these breakthroughs of the mysteries in understandable, transmissible manifestations carrying the weight of living myth. In this movement, we see the surfacing of the myth of the modern Western man, what we still believe to be the highest ideal in the individuated Self. This is the mythology and value of the idea of the individual, whose penultimate expression is the Artist. What matters to Campbell and the evolving sense of individual value is this: authentic experience as the road into and through the mysteries. For example, do you remember your first moment of falling in love? This is something we’ve all experienced. From a Campbellian perspective, this visceral encounter engages you in the mysteries. Comparatively, recall literary moments: Tristan and Isolde drinking the love/death potion, or Romeo and Juliet, the first moment they lay eyes on one another. In falling in love, we participate in the transpersonal, personally. The process, when we experience it in our depths, re-orders our inner axis. The way we see the world shifts, exposing the heart to the grave and constant. For you it might be that girl or boy you had on a crush on at 14. It’s the way their blue, hazel, or brown eyes light up at that moment they pass you on the street. As they look at you, you quiver in your bones. Butterflies invade your belly. You look up at the night sky, and the blanket of stars that before was mere confusion, is now a constellation of right times and right places; it is fate. You feel your own mystery in them. In a flash, you are different. Re-ordered. Before and after. In between, you are initiated. Now you will know pain. Longing, maybe ecstasy, but for sure suffering. Welcome to the Love/Death club. Something archetypal, something cosmic has happened to you, as it happens to all of us, all throughout time. Throughout Creative Mythology, Campbell reiterates what happens in these ordinary, extraordinary moments. The shattering of belief—about what love is, where or what God is—in the face of an authentic experience that we feel in our bones and in our bellies. It’s not someone else’s idea or ideal. It’s you in an experience that feels real for you. When we are genuinely present in these moments – ordinary moments, through which the extraordinary reveals itself – the great mysteries Campbell writes of open up to us too. Don’t miss out. Pick up Creative Mythology today. Open it to any page. The revelations drip from each one, waiting for you. Let Campbell’s ideas change the way you see your story and your life, revealing the day-to-day mysteries that await all of us. This is living myth.