Transcript:
https://app.podscribe.ai/episode/52388743Speaker 0 (0s): Is two big, giant metrics back. They look at me and judge me by my side is where you don't ever let somebody tell you, you can't do something. Not even me. All right. You've got a dream. You've got to protect it. People can't do something themselves.
They want to tell you, you can't do it. You want something? Go get it, period. Does it get easier? No yes. It gets easier. Yeah.
The more, you know who you are and what you want, the less, they look at things of say, you know, yeah,
Speaker 1 (1m 25s): I said it before, and I'll say it again. Life moves pretty fast.
Speaker 0 (1m 30s): You don't stop and look around once in a while you could miss It PMC things that have started a few things you never felt before you meet people was a different point of view. Hope you live a life. You proud. If you find that you're not hope you have the strength.
And again,
Speaker 1 (2m 7s): Welcome back heroes and heroines friends. Good. Look at people and intelligent forces of nature. I was so happy. You're back. I am digging this Joseph Campbell. I'm trying to really integrate some of these mythological journeys into my life. It's easy to do. Once you begin to understand the hero's journey. Once you began to understand the power of myth, you can really integrate into your life.
And I think you can make your life as well as the life of the people around you. Better.
Speaker 0 (2m 47s): Interesting and enjoyable. Let's jump right in here.
Speaker 1 (2m 55s): The question will begin with, to mr. Campbell is given you know about human beings. Is it conceivable that there is a part of wisdom beyond the conflicts of truth and illusion by which our lives can be put back together again? Can we develop new models, Joseph Campbell, they are already here in the religions. All religions have been true for their time.
If you can recognize the enduring aspect of their truth and separate it from the temporal applications, you've got it. We have spoken about it right here, the sacrifice of physical desires and fears of the body to that, which spiritually supports the body is the body learning to know and express its own deepest life in the field of time.
One way or another. We all have to find what the best Foster's the flowing of our humanity in this contemporary life and dedicate ourselves to that. Not the first Cause, but a higher Cause Joseph Campbell. I would say a more inward Cause hire is just up there and there is no up there. We know that that old man up there has been blown away.
You've got to find the force inside you. This is why Oriental gurus are so convincing. Two young people today, they say is in you go in and find it. But isn't it only the very few who can face the challenge of a new truth and put their lives and a quarter with it. Joseph Campbell, no, not at all. A few, maybe the teacher's and the leader, but this is something that anybody can respond to just as anybody has the potential to run out, to save a child.
It is within Everybody to recognize value's in his life that are not confined to maintenance of the body and economic concerns of the day. When I was a boy and red Knights of the round table, that myth stirred me to think that I could be a Hero. I wanted to go out and do battle with dragons. I wanted to go into the dark forest and slate evil. What does it say to you that myths can because the son of an Oklahoma farmer to think of himself as a Hero Joseph Campbell myths inspire the realization of the possibility of your perfection, the fullness of your strength and the bringing of solar light into the world.
Slaying monsters is slaying the dark thing. Myths, grab you somewhere down inside as a boy, you go at it one way. As I did reading my Indian stories later on myths, tell you more and more and still more. I think that anyone who has ever dealt seriously with religious or mythic ideas will tell you that we learned them as a child on one level, but then many different levels are revealed. Myths are infinite in the revelation.
How do I slay that dragon in MI what's the journey. Each of us has to make what you call the soul's high adventure. Joseph Campbell, my general formula for my students is follow your bliss, find where it is, and don't be afraid to follow it. Is it my work or my life Joseph Campbell. If the work that you are doing is the word that you chose to do because you are enjoying it.
That's it. But if you think, Oh no, I couldn't do that. That's the dragon locking you in? No, No I couldn't be a writer or no, no, I couldn't possibly do what so-and-so was doing in this sense. Unlike heroes, such as Prometheus's or Jesus, we're not going on our journey to save the world, but to save ourselves Joseph Campbell. But in doing that, you saved the world, the influence of a vital person.
Vitalizes there's no doubt about it. The world without spirit is a wasteland. People have the notion of saving the world by shifting things around, changing the rules and who's on top and so forth. No No any world is a valid world. If it's alive, the thing to do is to bring life to it. And the only way to do that is to find in your own case where the life is and become alive yourself.
When I take that journey and go down there and slay those dragons, do I have to go alone? Joseph Campbell, if you have someone who can help you, that's fine too. But ultimately the last deed has to be done by oneself. Psychologically, the dragon is one's own binding of oneself to one's ego. We are captured in our own dragon cage. The problem of the psychiatrist is to disintegrate that dragon break it up so that you may expand to a larger field of relationships.
The ultimate dragon is within you. It is your ego clamping you down. What, what is my ego, Joseph Campbell, what you think you want, what you will to believe, what you think you can afford, what you decide to love, what you regard yourself as bound to be. It may be all much to small in which case it will nail you down. And if you simply do what your neighbors tell you to do, you're certainly going to be down.
Your neighbors are then your dragon, as it reflects from within yourself are a Western dragons represent greed. However, the Chinese dragon is different. It represents the vitality of the swamps and comes up, beating its belly and bellowing, right? Yeah. I'd say a lovely kind of dragon. One that yields the bounty of the water is a great glorious gift. But the dragon of our Western tails tries to collect and keep everything to himself.
And his secret cave. He guards things, heaps of gold and perhaps a captured Virgin. He doesn't know what to do with either. So he just guard's and keeps it. There are people like that and we call them creeps. There is no life from them, no giving. They just glue themselves to you and hangs around and try to suck out your life. Carl Young had a patient who came to him because she felt herself to be a lone in the world, on the rocks.
And when she drew a picture for him up how she felt their, she was on the shore of a dismal seed, khat and rocks from the waist down, the wind was blowing and her hair was blowing. And all the gold, all the joy of life was locked away from her in the rocks. The next picture that she drew, however, followed something that he had said to her, a flash of lightening strikes, the rocks and a golden disc is being lifted out. There is no more gold box within the rock to have a goal old and patches.
Now on the surface and the course of the conferences that follow these patches of gold, right? Identified. They were her friends. She wasn't alone. She had locked herself in her own little room in life. Yet she had friends, her recognition of these followed only after the killing of her dragon. I like what you say about the old myth of Theseus in Aranon day. Theseus says, I'll love you forever. If you can show me away to come out of the labyrinth.
So she gives him a ball, the street, which he unwinds as it goes into the labyrinth and then follows to fine the way out you say all he had was the string. That's all you need. Joseph Campbell, that's it. That's all you need an Ariadne thread. Sometimes we look for great wealth to save us a great power to save us or great ideas to save us.
When all we need is that piece of string, Joseph Campbell. It's that is not always easy to find, but it's nice to have someone who can give you a clue. That's a teacher's job to help you find your area in any thread. Like all hero's the Buddha doesn't show you the truth itself. He shows you the way, right?
Speaker 0 (12m 3s): The truth,
Speaker 1 (12m 6s): Joseph Campbell. But it's got to be your way. Not his, the Buddha. Can't tell you exactly how to get rid of your particular fears. For example, different teachers may suggest exercises, but they may not be the one to work for you. All they teacher can do is suggest he's like a light house that says there are rocks over there. Steer clear there as a channel. However, out there,
Speaker 0 (12m 32s): The big ones
Speaker 1 (12m 33s): Of any young person's life is to have models to suggest possibilities. Nietzsche says, man is the sick animal. Man is the animal that doesn't know what to do with itself. The mind has many possibilities, but we can live no more than one life. What are we going to do with ourselves? A living myth presents contemporary models. Today. We have an endless variety of models. A lot of people end up choosing many in Never, knowing who they are, Joseph Campbell.
When you choose your vocation, you have actually chosen a model and it will fit you in a little while. After the middle of life. For example, you can pretty well. Tell what a person's profession is. Wherever I go, people know I'm a professor. I don't know what it is that I do or how I look. But I too can tell professors from engineers and merchants you're shaped by your life. There is a wonderful image in King.
Arthur were the Knights of the Roundtable are about to enter this search for the grail and the dark Forrest. And the narrator says they thought it would be a disgrace to go forth in a group. So each interred the forest at a separate point of his choice, you've interpreted that to express the Western emphasis upon the unique phenomenon of a single human life, the individual confronting darkness, Joseph Campbell. What struck me when I read that in the 13th century quest Dell Saint brah, was that a pittance and especially Western spiritual, Aime and ideal, which is of living the life that has potential in you and was never in anyone else.
As a possibility, this I believe is the great Western truth that each of us is a completely unique creature and that if we are ever to give any gift to the world, they will have to come out of our own experience and fulfillment of our own potential realities, not someone else's and the traditional orient on the other hand, and generally in all traditionally grounded society's the individual is cookie molded.
His duties are put upon him in exactly the precise terms. And there's no way of breaking out from them. When you go to a guru to be guided on the spiritual way, he knows just where you are on the traditional path, just where you have to go next, or just what you must due to get there, who would give you his picture to wear. So you can be like him. That wouldn't be a proper Western pedagogical way of guidance. We have to give our students guidance, developing their own pictures of themselves.
What each must seek in his life never was on land or sea is to be something out of his own unique potentiality for experience something that never has been, and they never could have been experienced by anyone else. There's the question Hamlet asked, are you up to your destiny? Joseph Campbell Hamlet's problem wasn't that he wasn't. He was given a destiny too big for him to handle and a blue them to pieces that can happen to which stories from mythology, help us understand death.
Joseph Campbell, you don't understand death. You learn to acquiesce in death. I would say that the story of Christ, assuming the form of a human servant, even to death on the cross is the principle lesson for us of the acceptance of death. The story of Oedipus in the Sphinx, it has something to say about this to the Sphinx. And the Oedipus story is not the Egyptian Sphinx, but the female form with the wings have a bird or the body of an animal.
And the breast, neck and face have a woman. What she represents is the destiny of all life. She has sent a plague over the land and to lift the plague. The Hero has to answer the riddle that she presents. What is it that walks on four legs then on two legs and been on three. The answer is man, the child creeps about on the four legs. The adult walks on too. And the aged to walk with a cane, the riddle of the Sphinx is the image of life itself through time, childhood maturity, age and death.
When without fear you have faced and excepted, the middle of the Sphinx death has no further hold on you. And the curse of the Sphinx disappears. The conquest of the fear of death is the recovery of life's joy. One can experience an unconditional affirmation of life only when one has accepted death, not as contrary to light, but as an aspect of life, life, and it's becoming is always shedding death.
And on the point of death, the conquest of fear yields the courage of life. That is the Cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure, fearlessness, and achievement. Wow. I better read that again. Cause that was beautiful. The conquest of fear yields the courage of light, the conquest of fear. Yeilds the courage of light. That is the Cardinal initiation of every heroic adventure, fearlessness and achievement.
How are you guys should write that down? I'm going to write it down. That's something that you should write down. If we put in your rear view mirror, maybe in your bathroom mirror, where you might want to add that to may be one of your mantras in the morning, the conquest of fear yields the courage of life. I remember reading as a boy of the war cry of the Indian Braves, riding into battle against the rain of bullets of Custer's men. What a wonderful day to di there was no hanging on their to life.
That is one of the great messages of mythology. I, as I know, I, as I now know myself am not the final form of my being. We must constantly di one way or another to the cell foot already achieved. I, as I now know myself am not the final form of my beam. Do you have a story that illustrates this Joseph Campbell?
Well, the old English tail of Sergei when and the green Knight is a famous one, one day a green giant came writing on a great green horse and the King Arthur's dining hall or chola and journey one here. He cried to take this great battle ax that I carry and cut off my head. And then one year from today, meet me at the green chapel where I shall cut off his head.
The only night in the hall who had the courage to accept this in congruence invitation was Galen P of rows from the table. The green Knight got off his horse handed gave when the ax stuck out his neck and Galen with a single stroke chopped off his head, the green Knight stood up, picked up his head, took back the act climbed onto his horse. And as he rode away called back to the astonish Galen, I'll see in a year that year, everybody was very kind of Galen, a fortnight or so before the term of the adventure, he wrote off to search for the green Chappell and keep faith with the giant green night.
As the date approached with about three days to go gave him when he found himself before a Hunter's cabin, where he asked the way too, the green Chappell, the Hunter, a pleasant genial fellow, met him at the door and replied well, the chapel is just down the way, a few hundred yards. Why not spend your next three days here with us? We'd love to have you. And when your time comes, you're a green friend has just down the way. So gay one says, all right, and the Hunter that evening says to him now, early tomorrow, I'm going off a hunting, but I'll, I'll be back in the evening.
When we shall exchange our winnings of the day, I'll give you everything I get on the hunt and you give me whatever will have come to you. They laugh. And that was fine with Godwin. So they all retired at a bet in the morning, early a Hunter rides off while I was still asleep. Presently incomes, the hunters, extraordinarily beautiful wife who tickles gave one under the chin and wakes him and passionately invites him to a morning of love.
Well, he is a night of King Arthur's court in to betray. His host is the last thing. So a night can't Stoup to so gay when sternly resists, however she is insistent and makes more and more of an issue of this thing until finally she says to him, well then let me give you just one kiss. So she gives him one large smack. And that was that that evening. The Hunter arrives with a great hall of all kinds of small game, throws it onto the floor.
Gay wing gives him one large KIS. They laugh. And that two was that the second morning, the wife again comes into the room, more passionate than ever. And the fruit of the encounter is two kisses. The Hunter and the evening return's with about half as much game as before and receive two kiss'. And again, they laugh on the third morning, the wife is glorious and gay. When a young man about to meet his death has all he can to, to keep his head and retain his nightly on it.
With this last gift before him of the luxury of light this time, he accepts three kisses. And when she has delivered these, she begs him as he, a token of her love to accept her garter. It is charmed. She says, and will protect you against every dangerous. So Gavin excepts, the garter, and when a Hunter returns with just one silly smelly Fox, which he tosses onto the floor, he receives in exchange three from Galen, but no garter.
Do we not see what the tests are of this young Nite gave when they are the same as the first two of Buddha, one his, of desire, lust. If the other is have the fear of death, Q one had proved courage enough and just keeping his faith with this adventure. However, the Gardner, it was just one temptation to many. So when game was approaching the green chapel, here's the green Knight, their wedding, the great day.
Do you want arrives? And the giant simply says to him, stretch your neck out there on this block. Kay. When does, so in the green Knight, Lift's the ax, but then pauses. No, stretch it out a little more. He says, okay, when does so, and again, the giant elevates the great ax a little more. He says, once again, he, when does the best he can. And then with only giving Gaiman's neck one little screen And the green Knight who is in fact, the Hunter himself transfigured explains
Speaker 0 (24m 58s): Is that for the garter,
Speaker 1 (25m 1s): This They say is the origin legend of the order of the Knights of the garter and the moral of the story. Joseph Campbell, the moral, I suppose, would be that the First requirements for a heroic career are the Knightly virtues of loyalty. Temperance encourage the loyalty in this case is of two degrees or
Speaker 0 (25m 27s): First to the chosen adventure, right?
Speaker 1 (25m 30s): Then also to the ideals of the order of knighthood. Now this second commitment seems to put Gaiman's way in opposition to the way of the Buddha who were ordered by the Lord, have duty to perform the social duties proper to his cast, simply ignored the command. And that Knight achieved illumination as well as release from rebirth gay. When it is a European and like Odysseus who remained true to the earth and returned from the Island of the son, to his marriage, with Penelope, he has accepted as the commitment of his life, not released from But loyalty, too.
The values of life in this world. And yet, as we have just seen with a following the middle way, have the Buddha or the middle way of Galen, the passage to fulfillment lies between the perils desire and fear a third position closer than gay wins to that of the Buddha yet loyal still to the values of life on this earth is that have Nietzsche in that space
Speaker 0 (26m 39s): Zarathustra, right?
Speaker 1 (26m 41s): Any kind of parable, Nietzsche, what he calls to three transformations have the spirit. The first is that of the cameras of childhood and use the camel get's down on his knees and says, put a load on me. This is the season for obedience receiving instruction. And the information in your society requires of you in order to live it responsible life. But when the camel is Well loaded, it's struggle's to its feet and runs out into the desert where it is transformed and do a lion or the heavier, the load that have been carried, the stronger the lion will be.
Now the task of the lion is to kill a dragon. And the name of the dragon is thou shout on every scale of this scaly beast. A bow shout is imprinted. Some from 4,000 years ago, others from this morning is headlines where as the camel, the child had to submit to the vowel shoutouts, the lion for the youth is to throw them off and come to his own realization. And so when the dragon is thoroughly dead with all its vowel shouts overcome, the line is transformed and do a child moving out of its own nature, like a wheel and pilled from its own hub, no more rules to a Bay, no more rules derived from the historical needs and tasks, the local society, but the pure impulse to living of a life in flower.
So we return to Eden Campbell to Eden before the fall. What are the thou shalts have a child that he needs to shed. Joseph Campbell, everyone that inhibits his self fulfillment for the camel that thou shalt is a must, a civilizing force. It converts the human animal and to a civilized human being. But the period of youth is the period of self discovery and transformation into a lion.
The rules are now to be used at will for a life not submitting to be as compelling thou shouts. Something of this kind has to be recognized and dealt with by any serious student of art. If you go to a master to study and learn the techniques, you diligently follow all the instructions, the master puts upon you, but then comes the time for using the rules in your own way and not being bound by them. That is the time for the lion deed.
You can actually forget the rules because they have been assimilated. You are an artist. Your own innocence now is have one who has become an artist who has been, as it were transmuted. You don't behave as the person behaves who has never mastered an art. Do you see that by the time comes? How does the child know when his time has come an ancient societies? The boy for example, went through a ritual, right? Which told him the time had come.
He knew that he was no longer a child and that he had to put off the influence. It says of others and Stan on his own. We don't have such a clear moment or an obvious ritual in our society that says to my son, you are a man, where is the passage today? Joseph Campbell. I don't have that answer. I figured you must leave it. Is it up to the boy to know when he has got his power, a baby bird knows when it can fly.
We have a couple of birds nest, right near where we have breakfast in the morning. And we have seen several little families launched these little things. Don't make a mistake. They stay on the branch until they know how to fly it. And then they fly. I think somehow inside a person knows this. I can give you examples. From what I knew, have students in art studios, there comes a moment when they have learned what the artists can teach them. They have assimilated this craft and they are ready for their own flight.
Some of the artists allow their students to do that. They expect the student to fly off. Others want to establish a school and the school and find he has got to be nasty to that. The teacher, or to say bad things about him in order to get up on his own flight. But that is the teacher's own fault. He ought to have known. It was time for the student to fly the students. I know the ones who are really valid have students. No. When it was time to push off, right? There is an old prayer that says, Lord, teach us wind to let go.
Of all of us. Have to know that don't We Joseph Campbell. That's the big problem of the parent being a parent. It was one of the most demanding careers. I know when I think what my father and mother gave up of themselves to launch their family. Well, I really appreciate it. My father was a businessman in of course he would have been very happy to it. They have a son going into business with him and take it on. In fact, I did go into business with dad for a couple of months, and then I thought, geez, I can't do this.
After he let me go. There is that testing time in your life. When you live, got to test yourself out to your own flight myths, they use to help them. No. When to let it go. Joseph Campbell myths formulate things for you. They say, for example, that you have to become an adult at a particular age. The age might be a good average age for that to happen. But actually in the individuals life, it differs greatly.
Some people that are late bloomers and com to particular stages at a relatively late age, you have to have a feeling for where you are. You've got only one life to live and you don't have to live at for six people pay attention to it. What about happiness? If I'm a young person and I want to be happy, what do myths? Tell me about happiness. Joseph Campbell. The way to find out about your happiness is to keep your mind on those moments.
When you feel most happy, when you really are happy, not excited and not just thrilled, but deeply happy. This requires a little bit of self analysis. What is it that makes you happy? Stay with it. No matter what people tell you, this is what I call following your bliss. But how does mythology tell you about what makes you happy? Joseph Campbell? It won't tell you what makes you happy, but it will tell you what happens when you begin to follow your happiness.
When the obstacles are that you're going to run into, for example, there's a motif in American Indian stories that I call the refusal of suitors. There's a young girl, beautiful, charming. And the young men invite her to marriage. No, no, no. She says there's nobody around. Good enough for me. So a serpent comes or if it's a boy who won't have anything to do with girl's the serpent queen of great Lake.
Mike, as soon as you have refused the suiters, you have elevated herself out of the local field and put yourself in the field of higher power, higher danger. The question is, are you going to be able to handle it? Another American Indian motif involves a mother and two little boys. The mother says you can play around the houses, but don't go North or so, of course they go North. That's the adventurer.
And what is the point of that? Joseph Campbell with the refusal of suitors, have the passing over a boundary. The adventure begins. You get into a field that's unprotected novel. You can't have creativity unless you leave behind the bounded, the fixed all of the rules. Now there is an Iroquois, a story that illustrates the motif of the rejection of suitors. A girl lived with her mother in a wigwam on the edge of a village.
She was a very beautiful girl, but extremely proud and would not accept any of the boys. The mother was terribly annoyed with her. One day throughout collecting would be quite a long way from the village. And while they were out in almond, as a darkness comes over to them. Now this wasn't the dark of night to sending. When you have a darkness, have this kind of, there's a magician at work somewhere behind it. So the mother says, let's gather some Barak and make it a little wigwam for ourselves and collect wood for a fire and will just spend the night here.
So they do exactly that and prepare a little supper. And the mother falls asleep. Suddenly the girl looks up and there was a magnificent young man standing there before her with a WAM Palm sash, glorious black feathers, a very handsome fellow. He says, I've come to Mary. You and I'll wait for your reply. And she says, I have to consult with my mother. She does. So the mother excepts the young man, and he gives the mother, the wampum belt to prove he's serious about the proposal.
Then he sets with a girl tonight. I was like you to come into my camp. And so she leaves with him near human beings. Weren't good enough for this young lady. And so now she has something really special. If she hadn't said no to the first suitors who came through the routine, teen social convention, Joseph Campbell, then she wouldn't be having this adventure. Now the adventure is strange and marvelous. She accompanies the man to his village and they enter his lodge.
They spend two nights and days together. On the third day, he says to her, I'm going off today to hunt. So he leaves, but after he has closed the flap of the insurance, she hears this strange sound outside. She spins the day in the hut alone. And when evening comes, she hears the stream sound again at the entrance flap is flung open and in slides, a prodigious serpent with tongue darting. He puts his head on her lap. Ben says to her now search my head for lice.
She finds all sorts of horrible things there. And when she has killed them all, he withdraws his head. Slide's out of the lodge. And in a moment after the door flap has closed, it opens again and incomes her same beautiful young man. Were you afraid of me? When I came in that way, just know he asks, you know, she replies, I wasn't afraid at all. So the next day he goes off to hunt again and presently she steps out of the lodge together for firewood.
So the first thing she sees, and that is an enormous serpent basking on the rocks and then another and another, she begins to feel very strange, homesick and discouraged and returns to the lodge that evening. The serpent again comes sliding in again, departs and returns as a man. The third day, when he has gone, the young woman decided she is going to try to get out of this place. She leaves the lodge and is in the woods alone, standing thinking when she hears a voice, she turns and there's a little old man who says, darling, you are in trouble.
The man you've married, it was one of seven brothers. They are all great magicians. And like many people of this kind, their hearts are not in their bodies. Go back into your lodge and in a bag that is hidden under the bed of the one to whom you are married, you will find a collection of seven Hart's. This is a standard worldwide shamonic motif. The heart is not in the body. So the magician cannot be killed. You have to find and destroy the heart.
Should we turn to the lodge, find the bag full of hearts and is running out with it. When a voice calls to her
Speaker 2 (39m 20s): Stop, stop.
Speaker 1 (39m 23s): This is the voice of course of the magician, but she continues to run. And the voice calls after you may think you can get away from me, but you never we'll just at that point, she is beginning to faint. When she hears again, the voice of the little old man, I'll help you I'll help you. It says And to our surprise. He was pulling her out at the water. She hadn't known that she was in water. That is to say that with her marriage, she had to move out of the rational conscious sphere into the field of compulsions of the unconscious.
That's always, what's represented in such adventures underwater. The character has slipped out of the realm of controlled action into that, have the transpersonal compulsion's and events. Now, maybe these can be handled. Maybe they can't. What happens next in the story is that when the old man has pulled her out of the water, she finds herself in the midst of a company of old men, standing along the shore, all looking exactly like her rescuer.
They are the Thunderbirds powers of the upper air. That is, she is still in the trends and dent realm. And to which she brought herself by her refusal of suitors. Only. Now having torn herself away from the negative aspect of the powers, she has come into possession of the positive. There's a lot more to the Iroquois tail, how this young woman now in this service of the higher powers, enabled them to destroy the negative powers of the abyss and how after that she was conducted back through a rainstorm to the lodge of her mother.
Would you tell this to your students as an illustration of how
Speaker 2 (41m 20s): And how if they follow their books,
Speaker 1 (41m 22s): If they take chances with their lives, if they do what they want to, the adventure is its own reward. Joseph Campbell, the adventure is its own reward, but it's necessarily dangerous having both negative and positive possibilities. All of them beyond control. We are following our own way. Not our fathers not are mothers way. So we are beyond protection in a field of higher powers.
Then we know that one has to have some sense of what the conflict possibilities will be in this field. And here a few good archetypal stories like this may help us to know what to expect if we have been in Gooden and all together and eligible for the role and to which we have cast ourselves is going to be a demon marriage in a real mess. However, even here, there may be hurt a rescuing voice to convert the adventure into a glory beyond anything ever imagined.
It's easier to stay home, stay in the womb, not take this off
Speaker 0 (42m 43s): Joseph Campbell. Yes,
Speaker 1 (42m 45s): But in life could dry up because you are not off on your own adventure. On the other hand, I have had an opposite. And to me, quite surprising experience in meeting and coming to know someone who's whole youth was controlled and directed by others. From first to last, my friend is a Tibet who as a child was recognized as being the reincarnation of an Abbot who had been reincarnating since about the 17th century, he was taken into a monastery at the age of about four.
And from that moment never was asked what he would like to do, but an all things follow to the letter, the rules and instruction of his masters, his entire life was planned for him. According to the ritual requirements of Tibetan Buddhist monastery life, every stage in his spiritual development was celebrated with a ceremony. His personal life was translated into an archetypal journey so that although on the surface, he would seem to be enjoying no personal existence whatsoever.
He was actually living on a very deep spiritual level and art type of life like that of a divinity in 1959, this life ended the Chinese communist military station in Lhasa bombed the summer palace of the Dalai Lama. And the season of massacres began. There were a monster is around loss of, of as many as 60,000 monks. All we were destroyed and they were amongst and Abbotts were killed and tortured.
They fled many fled together with hundreds of other refugees across the almost Himalayas to India and is a terrible story. Largely untold. Finally, all of these shattered people to ride in India, which can hardly take care of its own population and among the refugees where the Dalai Lama himself and the number of the leading officers' and Abbots have the great monasteries now were destroyed and they all agreed. Buddhist Tibet is finished.
My friend and the other young amongst who had managed to escape were advised therefor to regard their vowels now as have the past, and to feel free, to choose either, to continue somehow as monks or to give up the monastic life and try to find a way to reshape their lives to the requirements of possibilities of the modern secular man, my friend, show's the latter away, not realizing of course, but this would mean in the way of frustration, poverty, and suffering.
He has had a really difficult time, but he, as a survivor, he has survived it with the will and composure of a Saint, nothing phases him. I've known him, worked with him now for over a decade. And in all of this time, I haven't heard of one word, either a recrimination against the Chinese, or have a complaint about the treatment he has received here in the West, nor from the Dalai Lama himself, where you ever hear the word of resentment or condemnations, these men and all they're friends have been the victims, have a terrific upheaval of terrific violence.
And yet they have no hatred. I have learned what religion is from these men. He was true. Religion alive today. Love dine enemies. Joseph Campbell love thine enemies because they are the instruments. Have your destiny. What do myths? Tell us about a God who lets two suns in one family die in a relatively short period of time and who continues to visit on that family one or deal after another?
I remember the story of the young Buddha who saw the decrepit old man and said shame on birth because to everyone who is born old age will come, what does mythology say about suffering Joseph Campbell? Since you bring up the Buddha, let's talk about that example. The story of the Buddhist childhood is that he was born as a Prince and that at the time of his birth, a prophet told his father that the infant would grow up to be either a world ruler or a world teacher.
The good King was interested in his own profession. And the last thing he wanted was that his son should become a teacher of any kind. So he arranged to have the child brought up in an especially beautiful palace where he should be experiencing nothing, the least bit ugly or pleasant that might turn in his mind to a serious thought. Beautiful young women played music and took care of the child. And there were beautiful gardens load as pawns and all. But then one day the young Prince said to his cherry, a driver, his closest friend, I'd like to go out and see what life has like in the town is father on hearing this, try to make everything nice so that his son, the young Prince should see nothing of pain and misery of his life or in the world.
The gods, however, saw to it that the father's program for his son, should it be frustrated. So as the Royal cheery, it was rolling along with the town, which had been swept clean with everything ugly kept out of sight. One of the gods assume the form of a decrepit old man. It was standing there within a view what's that the young Prince asked the charioteer and the reply he received was to that is an old man that's age are all men then to grow old, ask to the Prince, ah, yes, the cherry a tree replied then shame on life.
So in the traumatizing young Prince, and he begged sick at heart to be driven home on a second trip, he saw it a sick man thin and a week and tottering. And again are learning the meaning of this site. His heart failed him and the cheery, it returned to the palace. On the third trip, the Prince saw a corpse followed by mourners that said the charioteer his death turned back to the Prince that I may somehow find deliverance from these destroyers of life, old age sickness and death, just one trip Moore.
And what he sees this time is a mendicant monk. What sort of man is that? He asks that as a Holy man in the driver replies one who has abandoned the goods of this world and lives without desire or fear were upon the young Prince on returning to his palace resolved to leave his father's house and to seek a way of release from life's sorrows. Do most myths say that suffering is an intrinsic part of life and that there's no way around it.
Joseph Campbell. I can't think of any that say that if your going to live, you won't suffer myths, Telus, how to confront and Behr and interpret suffering. But they do not say that in life there can or should be no suffering. When the Buddha declares, there is a scape from Saara, the escape is Nirvana, which is not a place like heaven, but a psychological state of mind in which you are released from the desire and fear.
And then your life becomes Joseph Campbell harmonious centered and affirmative. Even with suffering Joseph Campbell, exactly the Buddhist speak of the bodhisattva. The one who knows immortality get voluntarily enters into the field of the fragmentation of time and participates willingly and joyfully in the sorrows of the world. And this means not only experiencing sorrows one cell, but participating with compassion and the sorrows of others.
Compassion is the awakening of the heart from be steel self-interest to humanity. The word compassion means literally suffering with right, but you don't mean compassion, condoned suffering. Do you? Joseph Campbell, of course, compassion, condone, suffering. And that it recognizes yes. Suffering is life. That life is live the suffering Joseph Campbell with the suffering, but your not going to get rid of it.
Who when or where has ever been quit of the suffering of life in this world, I had an illuminating experienced from a woman who had been in severe physical pain for years from an affliction that had stricken her in her youth. She had been raised, he believed believing Christian. And so the thought that this has been God's punishment of her for something she had done or not done at the time, she was in spiritual as well as physical pain. I told her that if she wanted release, she should affirm and not deny her suffering was her life.
And that through it, she had become the noble creature that she now was. And while I was saying all this, I was thinking, who am I to talk like this to a person in real pain? When I have never had anything more than a tooth take, but in the conversation and affirming her suffering as the sharper and teacher of her life, she experienced a conversion right there. I have kept in touch with her since that was years and years ago, she is indeed a transformed woman.
There was a moment of illumination. Yes, right there. I saw it. Was it something you said mythologically Joseph Campbell. Yes. Although it's a little hard to explain. I gave her the belief that she was herself, the, because of her suffering that she had somehow brought it about. There is an important idea in Nietzsche of our more fatigued, the love of your fate, which is in fact you're life.
As he says, if you say no to a single factor in your life, you have unraveled the whole thing. Furthermore, the challenging or threatening this situation or context to be assimilated in a, from the greater the stature of the person who can achieve it, the demon that you can swallow gives you what's power and the greater lives pain.
Speaker 3 (53m 22s): The greeter lives by my friend thought God did this
Speaker 1 (53m 26s): To me. I told her, no, you did it to yourself. The God is within you. You yourself are your creator. If you find that place in yourself, from which you brought this thing about, you will be able to live with it and affirm it. Perhaps even enjoy it as your life.
Speaker 0 (53m 49s): I'm going to pause there for a minute
Speaker 1 (53m 52s): And just leave it here with one last little quote, all life,
Speaker 0 (53m 56s): The suffering all life is suffering. Set the Buddha and Joyce have a line of his life worth living.
Speaker 1 (54m 8s): I think it's such a poetic place to stop for today.
Speaker 0 (54m 11s): All right.
Speaker 1 (54m 14s): And if you can take anything away, take away this, the things in your life that bring you saw are the things in your life that you feel as if you're suffering from R in fact, have things that bring you your greatest strength. I remember talking to a friend of mine and we were talking about life and transgressions things that we got wrong. And I remember having this particular thought that those who seem to be the most disadvantaged actually have the most opportunity.
And what I mean by that is, and you can even apply it to your life. The times when you were the most disadvantaged, the greatest stories you'll ever here are the ones are the ones that are the most inspiring. And the ones that are the most inspiring are the ones who have overcome the biggest obstacles. So a good way to think of situations in your life are, and your family's life, where in the lives of people you care about is when their, at their lowest, this is the best opportunity for them to get through this and inspire other people.
I also once made the claim. That's what the light is trying to teach you. When life barrels you over, when a blindside you want some idol today, it makes me think of the world as a
Speaker 0 (55m 40s): Beautiful, all right,
Speaker 1 (55m 42s): Loving, however, mischievous in cruel Vixen finds ways to you.
Speaker 0 (55m 48s): Got you. Okay.
Speaker 1 (55m 50s): So when something horrible happens to you, that's because the earth, God, whatever is spiritual, divine being, you believe in. Think you can overcome it. Not only does that divine being think you can overcome it, but it knows you have the strength too. And it's forcing you into this horrible situation so that you can't overcome it coming out of it stronger and teach other people. If you think about that for a little while, I have found that helps my life incredibly be more fulfilling.
That's all got for you guys today. I love you guys. I hope you have a great rest of your day, a lot.