Joseph Campbell and the “Inner Life”
As a young adult I used to see pictures of Hindu and eastern religious art and be shocked at the pictures of the gods with their 8 arms and dragon faces. “They’re all going straight to hell,” I’d think. LOL. But as I’ve gotten older and seen the confusion in my own life as to how to resolve the various parts of myself, I’ve come to respect much of what these other cultures try to do. In many ways their depth blows away my uptight Midwestern culture with its attempt to keep a lid on anything threatening.
Joseph Campbell made a life of studying myths in other cultures and as he put it, “they liberated my faith.” Campbell had a Catholic upbringing and ‘til his dying day enjoyed communion as a way of feeling oneness with God. But he found his faith bound by limitations – clergy being stuck on the ethics of good and evil versus illuminating the Biblical narrative as metaphors to the inner life, childish ways of thinking — like creationism, an environment where people were directed to live inauthentic lives, never doing a thing they truly wanted because so called “supernatural laws” required them to live as directed by their clergy. He would later feel that every religion was true when understood metaphorically. As he studied the myths from around the world he related to their thrust — the maturation of the individual from dependency through adulthood, maturity to exit.
Here’s a few of his takes on various traditions that I found fascinating:
“‘All life is sorrowful’ is the first Buddhist saying and so it is. It wouldn’t be life if there were not temporality involved, which is sorrow – loss, loss, loss. You’ve got to say yes to life and see it as magnificent this way; for this is surely the way God intended it. I will participate in this game. It is a wonderful, wonderful opera – except that it hurts.”
“Heaven and hell are within us, and all the gods are within us. This is the great realization of the Upanishads of India in the ninth century B.C. All the gods, all the heavens, all the worlds, are within us.” The metaphor being that we needn’t look outside ourselves for either excitement or the cause of our problems. We create our problems by reacting to the outside world from what’s inside us. If the problem’s out there, we’re in trouble, because we can’t change it. If it’s in here . . . we can not only fix it, we can draw from the connection to God that exists.
From the Bible, the Garden of Eden is a metaphor for oneness with God and a place of unity. It is a place of non-duality of male and female, good and evil, God and human beings. The moment we “eat of the knowledge of good and evil,” we thrust ourselves into the world of duality, most prominently fear and desire. This can have some very damaging consequences if we stay there without getting back to the garden. That’s the benefit of meditation, to be removed from the duality and get back to the oneness.
And finally here’s one to try on next time you talk to God. Ramakrishna said that if all you think of are your sins then you’re a sinner. To which Campbell thought Catholic confession is all backwards. One should actually go in the booth, shut the door, and say, “Bless me Father, for I have been great, these are the good things I have done this week.”
