The Love of your Fate

 

Nietzsche was the one who did the job for me. At a certain moment in his life, the idea came to him of what he called 'the love of your fate.' Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, 'This is what I need.' It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. 

If you bring love to that moment--not discouragement--you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege! This is when the spontaneity of your own nature will have a chance to flow.

Then, when looking back at your life, you will see that the moments which seemed to be great failures followed by wreckage were the incidents that shaped the life you have now. You’ll see that this is really true. 

Nothing can happen to you that is not positive. Even though it looks and feels at the moment like a negative crisis, it is not. The crisis throws you back, and when you are required to exhibit strength, it comes. 

Joseph Campbell, Book: Reflections on the Art of Living (I have yet to read this book)

A Joseph Campbell Companion: Reflections on the Art of Living

Audible Audiobook

How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent?

"Maybe it is partly our ordinariness that makes humans magnificent. We persist, in spite of the daunting sameness of our days, in spite of a dull repetitiveness that might shape our lives – we persist in finding shards of beauty, and we persist in seeking out the experience of feeling something larger than ourselves, in something transcendent.

I like what Joseph Campbell has to say in Thou Art That about one possible path toward this:

“How does the ordinary person come to the transcendent? For a start, I would say, study poetry. Learn how to read a poem. You need not have the experience to get the message, or at least some indication of the message. It may come gradually.”

Transcendence - On Reading Poetry

http://transactionswithbeauty.com/home/5nhhwzyet5pnkp93lsn7wdp56r86ek

The Functions of Mythology

​"The first function of a mythology is to reconcile waking consciousness to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans of this universe as it is: the second being to render an interpretive total image of the same, as known to contemporary consciousness. Shakespeare's definition of the function of his art, "to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature," is thus equally a definition of mythology. It is the revelation to waking consciousness of the powers of its own sustaining source.

A third function, however, is the enforcement of a moral order: the shaping of the individual to the requirements of his geographically and historically conditioned social group, and here an actual break from nature may ensue, as for instance (extremely) in the case of a castrato. Circumcisions, subincisions, scarifications, tattoos, and so forth are socially ordered brands and croppings, to join the merely human body in membership to a larger, more enduring, cultural body, of which it is required to become an organ - the mind and feelings being imprinted simultaneously with a correlative mythology. And not nature, but society, is the alpha and omega of this lesson."

Page 4, 'Experience and Authority', from 'The Masks of God: Creative Mythology', by Joseph Campbell

Eternal release, while living

"The most widely revered Oriental personification of such a world-affirming attitude, transcending opposites, is that figure of boundless compassion, the Bodhisattva Avalokiteshvara, known to China and Japan as Kuan Yin, Kwannon. For, in contrast to the Buddha, who at the conclusion of his lifetime of teaching passed away, never to return, this infinitely compassionate one, who renounced for himself eternal release to remain forever in this vortex of rebirths, represents through all time the mystery of a knowledge of eternal release while living.

The liberation thus taught is, paradoxically, not of escape from the vortex, but of full participation voluntarily in its sorrows, moved by compassion; for indeed, through selflessness one is released from self, and with release from self there is release from desire and fear. And as the Bodhisattva is thus released, so too are we, according to the measure of our experience of the perfection of compassion."

Page 155, 'The Mythology of Love', from 'Myths to Live By', Joseph Campbell

Ritual

As the night settles in the train, he climbs up to the top berth, and performs namaz, his prayers. Simple gestures, a pattern to follow five times a day, known, familiar. A ritual, a repetition, a returning to the centre, a remembering.

Nothing prepares you for the sudden stab of envy you feel. 

The amazement of it. Where is this bend in the road you have reached, what do you see now?

And then this morning, while waiting for a friend, you come upon this passage in the Joseph Campbell book you have been reading, and you again feel the same catch in your throat.

“For it is the rite, the ritual and its imagery, that counts in religion, and where that is missing the words are mere carriers of concepts that may or may not make contemporary sense. A ritual is an organization of mythological symbols; and by participating in the drama of the rite one is brought directly in touch with these, not as verbal reports of historic events, either past, present, or to be, but as revelations, here and now, of what is always and forever.

Where the synagogues and churches go wrong is by telling what their symbols “mean”.  The value of an effective rite is that it leaves everyone to his own thoughts, which dogma and definitions only confuse. Dogma and definitions rationally insisted upon are inevitably hindrances, not aids, to religious meditation, since no one’s sense of the presence of God can be anything more than a function of his own spiritual capacity.

Having your image of God – the most intimate, hidden mystery of your life – defined for you in terms contrived by some council of bishops back, say, in the fifth century or so: what good is that? But a contemplation of the crucifix works; the odor of incense works; so do, also, hieratic attires, the tones of well-sung Gregorian chants, intoned and mumbled Introits, Kyries, heard and unheard consecrations.

What has the “affect value” of wonders of this kind to do with the definitions of councils, or whether we quite catch the precise meaning of such words as Oramus te, Domine, per merita Sanctorum tuorum? If we are curious for meanings, they are there, translated in the other column of the prayerbook. But if the magic of the rite is gone….

Page 97, ‘Myths to Live By’, Joseph Campbell

Photo: Jamia Masjid, Bijapur

Myths, and the Powers of the Psyche

"An altogether different approach is represented by Carl G. Jung, in whose view the imageries of mythology and religion serves positive, life-furthering ends. According to his way of thinking, all the organs of our bodies - not only those of sex and aggression - have their purposes and motives, some being subject to conscious control, others, however, not.

Our outward-oriented consciousness, addressed to the demands of the day, may lose touch with these inwards forces; and the myths, states Jung, when correctly read, are the means to bring us back in touch. They are telling us in picture language of powers of  the psyche to be recognized and integrated in our lives, powers that have been common to the human spirit forever, and which represent that wisdom of the species by which man has weathered the millenniums.

Thus they have not been, and can never be, displaced by the findings of science, which relate rather to the outside world than to the depths that we enter in sleep. Through a dialogue conducted with these inward forces through our dreams and through a study of myths, we can learn to know and come to terms with the greater horizon of our own deeper and wiser, inward self. And analogously, the society that cherishes and keeps its myths alive will be nourished from the soundest, richest strata of the human spirit.

Page 4, The Impact of Science on Myth, in 'Myths to Live By', Jospeh Campbell

Rapture

"People say that what we're all seeking is a meaning for life. I don't think that's what we're really seeking. I think that what we're seeking is an experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our own innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive."

Page 1, 'The Power of Myth', Joseph Campbell

Incommunicability

"...The Buddha's enlightenment is the most important single moment in Oriental mythology, a counterpart of the Crucifixion of the West. The Buddha beneath the Tree of Enlightenment (the Bo Tree) and Christ on Holy Rood (the Tree of Redemption) are analogous figures, incorporating an archetypal World Savior, World Tree motif, which is of immemorial antiquity.

...The point is that Buddhahood, Enlightenment, cannot be communicated, but only the way to Enlightenment. This doctrine of the incommunicability of the Truth which is beyond names and forms is basic to the great Oriental, as well as to the Platonic, traditions.

Whereas the truths of science are communicable, being demonstrable hypotheses rationally founded on observable facts - ritual, mythology, and metaphysics are but guides to the brink of a transcendent illumination, the final step to which must be taken by each in his own silent experience.

Hence one of the Sanskrit terms for sage is muni, "the silent one." Sakyamuni (one of the titles of Gautama Buddha) means "the silent one or sage (muni) of the Sakya clan." Though he is the founder of a widely taught religion, the ultimate core of his doctrine remains concealed, necessarily, in silence."

Page 25, 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces' , the seminal work of comparative mythology by Joseph Campbell

The Way

"...The Buddha's enlightenment is the most important single moment in Oriental mythology, a counterpart of the Crucifixion of the West. The Buddha beneath the Tree of Enlightenment (the Bo Tree) and Christ on Holy Rood (the Tree of Redemption) are analogous figures, incorporating an archetypal World Savior, World Tree motif, which is of immemorial antiquity.

...The point is that Buddhahood, Enlightenment, cannot be communicated, but only the way to Englightenment. This doctrine of the incommunicability of the Truth which is beyond names and forms is basic to the great Oriental, as well as to the Platonic, traditions.

Whereas the truths of science are communicable, being demonstrable hypotheses rationally founded on observable facts - ritual, mythology, and metaphysics are but guides to the brink of a transcendent illumination, the final step to which must be taken by each in his own silent experience.

Hence one of the Sanskrit terms for sage is muni, "the silent one." Sakyamuni (one of the titles of Gautama Buddha) means "the silent one or sage (muni) of the Sakya clan." Though he is the founder of a widely taught religion, the ultimate core of his doctrine remains concealed, necessarily, in silence."

Page 25, 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces' the seminal work of comparative mythology by Joseph Campbell

Rites of Passage

Probably this explains the immaturity we see all around us - perhaps our rites of passage from childhood are way too weak, of too short a duration, tending more towards fun at times - and therefore the message of dying to childishness, and taking full responsibility for one's life - is just not getting through?


Rites of Passage

“…The so-called rites of passage, which occupy such a prominent place in the life of a primitive society (ceremonials of birth, naming, puberty, marriage, burial, etc.), are distinguished by formal, and usually very severe, exercises of severance, whereby the mind is radically cut away from the attitudes, attachments, and life patterns of the stage being left behind.

Then follows an interval of more or less extended retirement, during which are enacted rituals designed to introduce the life adventurer to the forms and proper feelings of his new estate, so that when, at last, the time has ripened for the return to the normal world, the initiate will be as good as reborn.


Getting stuck in childhood

It has always been the prime function of mythology and rite to supply the symbols that carry the human spirit forward, in counteraction to those constant human fantasies that tend to tie it back. In fact, it may well be that the very high incidence of neuroticism among ourselves follows from the decline among us of such effective spiritual aid.

We remain fixated to the unexorcised images of our infancy, and hence disinclined to the necessary passages of our adulthood."

Page 6, 'The Hero with a Thousand Faces' by Joseph Campbell