Regarding Initiation

Alright, initiation! Penis snakes! Wooooo!

I feel like my posts have been mostly talking past yours, so this time I'm going to do a different thing and try to really focus on the things in this section that you've already talked about ... except for maybe a couple of things that I dog-eared and just can't pass up.

First, I agree. Long chapter. And to be honest, it took me a really long time to read, probably because at this point, I'm having a hard time caring. I just have this feeling that I'm going to get to the end of the book and just sort of sit there, blinking at it, kind of disappointed, thinking, "That's it?"

There's just all of this piling on of myth and symbol and psychoanalysis, and while the similarities between all these things are interesting, I'm having a hard time teasing out Campbell's "theory" based on what I've read so far, or even really understanding what the theory might be about. So far it looks a lot like "see what happens when I interpret Western myth in terms of Buddhist myth!?", but of course there must be more to it than that.

Anyway, enough grouching. You had some interesting things to say.

Who are our "medicine men" today? Who among us "fight the demons" so that we may "fight reality?"

I think this is done is by giving us stories and rituals that we can use to safely raft down the dark rivers of our subconscious. (I don't really know how to use this word correctly in a technical sense, but what I mean is the things that motivate us, but of which we aren't aware.)

To a large degree, I'm going to have to give the "medicine man" distinction to religious leaders. The stories that they tell about the universe, and our place in it, are the only ones big enough to quiet the demons of our deepest selves. And I'd include the New Atheists in this group as well, because they do the medicine-man thing just as well as your standard religious leader, or perhaps better: "I've thought about this already, so you don't have to do any thinking ... just trust me that this is the way things are."

However, I think that some of us are currently operating without medicine men, which strikes me as a fairly inefficient if not dangerous way to go about things. We don't entirely buy the Big Story that our society embraces, which leaves us somewhat adrift. Or as Campbell might say, lost in "the crooked lanes of [our] own spiritual labyrinth."

"Then he finds that he and his opposite are not of differing species, but one flesh." ... This makes me wonder about our interpretations of spiritual rebirth within the church. So often the dialogue centers on rejecting an old self, a kind of aggressive pushing away of a past or a still disappointing present self, rather than a whole and full acceptance of a new self.

I am inclined to agree with your implicit criticism of this approach, initially because I prefer the positive formulation (accepting the new) to the negative (rejecting the old). But also, I think it's because this idea of swapping selves via magic is fairly unhelpful, because it's not really the way things usually work. Certainly, moments of "seeing clearly" can rearrange our perspective, like you mention, but the actual, meaningful change, the one where we start treating the waiter or cashier like human beings, comes a bit at a time and as a habit, not like a magic, transmogrified self.

But I'm kind of hesitant about this, and could be convinced otherwise. Does it make sense to talk about a New Self sort of change? Could it be that it is exactly this story, about the Old Self and the New Self, that works its wonders down deep in our mental hardware and actually makes it possible for us to change from Old to New?

As the hero continues through his trials, he is sure to meet the goddess.

This section troubles me, not because of any well-thought-out objection, but because its gender language seems kind of musty. The binary man-ness and woman-ness implicit in the forms is questionable, and the patterns "man is born of woman, man pursues woman, the hero is male", while probably true for many people and societies throughout history, seem more tenuous now. I would be interested to hear a feminist reading of this section, as well as Woman as Temptress.

The majority of our conscious existence is spent simply perceiving.

I think this is a really interesting observation. So interesting all by itself that I can't think of anything to add.

Clearly, not everyone is vexed with the trouble of having to constantly turn down overly zealous attractive women.

But man, if you do have the problem, it's a vexing one!

Nevertheless, every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness.

You appear to interpret this in terms of Socrates, which I think is warranted: To know the good is to do the good. (And as a corollary useful for judgmental people like myself, "People are doing the best they know how.")

I think there's a different flavor to what Campbell is claiming here, though. I think what he's talking about not employing myth to explain the world, or the right action in circumstance x, but the Buddhist idea of Enlightenment. Enlightened persons, he suggests, are the ones who diffuse both wars and temper tantrums. And I think that for him, enlightenment has a lot to do with the dissolution of selfish desires and the recognition that everything is one.

I think there's a lot to be said for this claim -- Paul Martin's Original Faith, for example, makes a very explicit case that what Buddhism teaches is the deconstruction of the ego, and that once we have sufficiently worked through our own self-obsession, a new and beautiful world becomes available. (Original Faith is out of print at the moment, but hopefully will be back in soon).

Frankly, I like Martin's treatment of this idea better than I like Campbell's, maybe because it's more straightforward. And because it gives some of the practical suggestions you mention, including ways of approaching conflict in the world, sitting meditation, etc. To me, this suggests that myth alone is not enough, or at least it cannot merely be heard or seen, but must be acted on (or acted out) somehow, as with the aboriginal rituals, if it is to be effective.

It seems that at this point, one does not have to fear the loss of his or her identity, because what dwells within and beyond are the same bountiful and beautiful greatness ... I admit that I'm getting rather vague here, as Campbell himself does, but it seems to be true of the greatest and most compelling stories.

Something I've been noticing for a while is that many of the greatest and most useful stories about the world operate at a very high level of abstraction. Certainly, there are many interesting things about reducing the world to its constituent parts, and investigating and chronicling the highly predictable behavior of things like pebbles or molecules or quarks. And learning these things allows us to engineer a world that is more to our liking.

But there are things in the world that are too big and messy for us to reduce in this way, and which are just as real. And it's here that myth and religion and philosophy help us, precisely because they operate at the rarified and often suspiciously ephemeral levels of "ethics" and "metaphysics" and "snake gods". I think you're being broad rather than vague, and I think that broadness is extremely important, and something you shouldn't feel obligated to apologize for.

Thus, for the transcendent hero, the universe itself has been completely shifted and raised to a higher aesthetic level.

The word "aesthetic" here intrigues me. I wonder, what does aesthetics have to say about our status as perceivers, and what language does it use to tell the story of the hero, moving from ugliness to beauty?

Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of subduing hate by love ... the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his society. The rest of the world meanwhile (that is to say, by far the greater portion of mankind) is left outside the sphere of his sympathy and protection because outside the sphere of the protection of his god.

I think it's awfully generous for Campbell to give these evangelical groups the status of "partial solutions", but I also find it difficult to discount them entirely. Thinking in particular of the Christian West: it's obviously gotten something right, as argued by David Bentley Hart and others, but still seems terribly preoccupied with its own vision of the metaphysical machinery of the universe: "God is shaped like this, and relates to the universe like this, and we have to do this to get these souls saved." And because of this preoccupation, or maybe because of a powerful attention to the value of the individual and a belief in the eternal persistence of the individual, it seems entirely blind to the problem of the illusory self. Which I find completely frustrating. It's as if the big pieces we need to live loving lives are split among the world religions. It's like the problem is so big that there is no one story that can contain its solution.

And maybe that's what Campbell is alluding to here, in one of the sections I dog-eared:

It is obvious that the infantile fantasies which we all cherish still in the unconscious play continually into myth, fairy tale, and the teachings of the church, as symbols of indestructible being. This is helpful, for the mind feels at home with the images, and seems to be remembering something already known. But the circumstance is obstructive too, for the feelings come to rest in the symbols and resist passionately every effort to go beyond. The prodigious gulf between those childishly blissful multitudes who fill the world with piety and the truly free breaks open at the line where the symbols give way and are transcended.

But how unsatisfying! First, because Campbell's analysis seems deeply broken: we can't transcend the symbols, we can only deconstruct them, trade them for different ones.

But more than that, this section is frustrating because the dark side of our "childish bliss" is childish petulance, self-absorption, cruelty and hatred. And if the light of knowledge is only available to a small group of "truly free", isn't it a terribly feeble and pitiful light? If this is the nature of the saintly virtue -- to only be accessible to a lucky few -- then perhaps we should abandon it for a more democratic light, one that is not so remote, one that can be accepted by the multitudes, one that allows us all to become truly good.

And the last thing that my mind latched onto was this (quoted from the tao te ching):

All things are in process, rising and returning. Plants come to blossom, but only to return to the root. Returning to the root is like seeking tranquility. Seeking tranquility is like moving toward destiny. To move toward destiny is like eternity. To know eternity is enlightenment, and not to recognize eternity brings disorder and evil.

I'm very interested in the idea of transience -- not just as something that is accepted stoically, but as a value, something that is valued in and of itself. Where a thing is beautiful or good, not in spite of its fleeting nature, but precisely because it is passing. I'm not sure whether people can operate in this way, but I wonder what would be the implications if we could.

That's why this passage from the tao te ching is so interesting to me. The flow of ideas somehow seems to roll along like the flow of things:

Everything is change, life moves down into the earth, into death and the heart of things, rest and tranquility, and into accepting that the world can be no way other than the way it is, flowing forever into eternity. Failing to accept this about the world scatters and destroys, fills the world with unnecessary grief, and unmakes good things before the time for them to be unmade.