Free A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living (Collected Works of Joseph Campbell) by Joseph Campbell Page B
Authors: Joseph Campbell
and now, the moment you are living. For example, if you think that when you die your parents will be there and you’ll live with them forever, you may no longer appreciate the significant moments that you share with them on earth.
Every moment is utterly unique and will not be continued in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and should concentrate your attention on what you are experiencing now. I think that’s washed out a bit by the notion that everyone will be happy in heaven. You had better be happy here, now. You’d better experience the eternal here and now.. Being “happy with Him forever in heaven” means that while you are here on earth you should be happy: that is to say, your life should be identified with the divine power, the eternal power in all life. If you concretize the symbol of heaven, the whole situation disintegrates. You think, for example, that eternity is there, and your life is here. You believe that God, the source of energy, is there, and you are here, and He may come into your life or He may not. No, no—that source of eternal energy is here, in you, now.
That is the essence of Gnosticism, Buddha consciousness, and so forth. St. Paul got close to the idea when he said, “I live now, not I, but Christ in me.” I once made this observation in a lecture, and a priest in attendance said, “That’s blasphemy.”—an example of the church not conceding the very sense of the symbol.
On the other hand, since the function of the heaven image is to help you to die, to yield to where nature’s taking you rather than resist, I think you would tell a Christian child who is going to die that he is going to go to heaven.
The resistance to death
has to do with not knowing
where you’re going when you die.
In one of the sūtras, the Buddha is asked how one person helps another face death. He responds: “Suppose a house caught fire, and in the house was a father with three little children, and the children were afraid of the flames, but they wouldn’t go outside. The father says, ‘Now, look, outside we have a darling little goat cart. The goats are all waiting for you, so let’s go out and get in the cart.’” That is to say, you put something out past the flames for the person who is not able to experience anything else. This approach is a convenient means of bringing about a desirable and necessary act that the person would otherwise be incapable of performing.
When you support someone who is dying, you are helping that person to identify with the consciousness that is going to disengage from the body. We disengage from various things all of our lives. Finally, we identify with consciousness and disengage from our bodies.
In Buddhism,
the central thought is
compassion without attachment.
And so, the death of one for whom you feel com-passion shouldn’t be an affliction. Your attachment is the temporal aspect of the relationship; your compassion is the eternal aspect. Hence, you can reconcile yourself to feelings of loss by identifying with that which is not lost when all is lost: namely, the consciousness that informs the body and all things. This yielding back into undifferentiated consciousness is the return, and that is as far as you can think, as much as you can know. The rest is transcendent of all conscious knowledge.
[Discuss]
Coming into Awareness
T HE first aphorism of Patanjali’s classic handbook of yoga supplies the key to the entire work:
“Yoga consists in the intentional stopping
of the spontaneous activity of the mind-stuff.” 56
…Any person unused to meditation, desiring to fix in his mind a single image or thought, will find within seconds that he is already entertaining associated thoughts. The untrained mind will not stand still, and yoga is the intentional stopping of its movement.
It may be asked, why should anyone wish to bring about such a state?
The mind is likened, in reply, to the surface of a pond rippled by a
Every moment is utterly unique and will not be continued in eternity. This fact gives life its poignancy and should concentrate your attention on what you are experiencing now. I think that’s washed out a bit by the notion that everyone will be happy in heaven. You had better be happy here, now. You’d better experience the eternal here and now.. Being “happy with Him forever in heaven” means that while you are here on earth you should be happy: that is to say, your life should be identified with the divine power, the eternal power in all life. If you concretize the symbol of heaven, the whole situation disintegrates. You think, for example, that eternity is there, and your life is here. You believe that God, the source of energy, is there, and you are here, and He may come into your life or He may not. No, no—that source of eternal energy is here, in you, now.
That is the essence of Gnosticism, Buddha consciousness, and so forth. St. Paul got close to the idea when he said, “I live now, not I, but Christ in me.” I once made this observation in a lecture, and a priest in attendance said, “That’s blasphemy.”—an example of the church not conceding the very sense of the symbol.
On the other hand, since the function of the heaven image is to help you to die, to yield to where nature’s taking you rather than resist, I think you would tell a Christian child who is going to die that he is going to go to heaven.
The resistance to death
has to do with not knowing
where you’re going when you die.
In one of the sūtras, the Buddha is asked how one person helps another face death. He responds: “Suppose a house caught fire, and in the house was a father with three little children, and the children were afraid of the flames, but they wouldn’t go outside. The father says, ‘Now, look, outside we have a darling little goat cart. The goats are all waiting for you, so let’s go out and get in the cart.’” That is to say, you put something out past the flames for the person who is not able to experience anything else. This approach is a convenient means of bringing about a desirable and necessary act that the person would otherwise be incapable of performing.
When you support someone who is dying, you are helping that person to identify with the consciousness that is going to disengage from the body. We disengage from various things all of our lives. Finally, we identify with consciousness and disengage from our bodies.
In Buddhism,
the central thought is
compassion without attachment.
And so, the death of one for whom you feel com-passion shouldn’t be an affliction. Your attachment is the temporal aspect of the relationship; your compassion is the eternal aspect. Hence, you can reconcile yourself to feelings of loss by identifying with that which is not lost when all is lost: namely, the consciousness that informs the body and all things. This yielding back into undifferentiated consciousness is the return, and that is as far as you can think, as much as you can know. The rest is transcendent of all conscious knowledge.
[Discuss]
Coming into Awareness
T HE first aphorism of Patanjali’s classic handbook of yoga supplies the key to the entire work:
“Yoga consists in the intentional stopping
of the spontaneous activity of the mind-stuff.” 56
…Any person unused to meditation, desiring to fix in his mind a single image or thought, will find within seconds that he is already entertaining associated thoughts. The untrained mind will not stand still, and yoga is the intentional stopping of its movement.
It may be asked, why should anyone wish to bring about such a state?
The mind is likened, in reply, to the surface of a pond rippled by a
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