Detachment and Transfiguration - 2

"The first work of the hero is to retreat from the world scene of secondary effects to those causal zones of the psyche where the difficulties really reside, and there to clarify the difficulties, eradicate them in his own case (i.e., give battle to the nursery demons of his local culture) and break through to the undistorted, direct experience and assimilation of what C. G. Jung has called 'the archetypal images'....The hero, therefore, is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms.  Such a one's visions, ideas and inspirations come pristine from the primary springs of human life and thought.  Hence they are eloquent, not of the present disintegrating society and psyche, but of the unquenched source through which society is reborn."

"His second solemn task and deed therefore (as Toynbee and all the mythologies of mankind indicate) is to return then to us, transfigured, and teach the lesson he has learned of life renewed."

Detachment and transfiguration - 1

"But it is possible...for the principle of regeneration to be sought and found within the very walls of the tyrant's empire itself.  Professor Toynbee uses the terms "detachment" and "transfiguration" to describe the crisis by which the higher spiritual dimension is attained that makes possible the resumption of the work of creation.  The first step, detachment or withdrawal, consists of a radical transfer of emphasis from the external to the internal world, macro- to microcosm, a retreat from the desperations of the wasteland to the peace of the everlasting realm that is within....It is the realm we enter in sleep.  We carry it within ourselves forever.  All the ogres and secret helpers of our nursery are there, all the magic of childhood.  And more important, all the life potentialities that we never managed to bring to adult realization, those other portions of ourself, are there; for such golden seeds do not die.  If only a portion of that lost totality could be dredged up into the light of day, we should experience a marvelous expansion of our powers, a vivid renewal of life.  We should tower in stature.  Moreover, if we could dredge up something forgotten not only by ourselves but by our whole generation or our entire civilization, we should become indeed the boon-bringer, the culture hero of the day - a personage of not only local but world historical moment."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero With A Thousand Faces

Interesting again on several levels
     Culturally and politically
     Artistry and creativity
     Personal spiritual growth

For Campbell in the 40's, the "everlasting realm within" was identified completely with "the infantile unconscious" described with confident authority by the psychoanalysis of the time.  But since he paid equal homage to both Freud and Jung, it was a realm open to the potential of the wider spirituality of the Jungian vision, including its vague intimations of the numinous, the divine and (with synchronicity) even of providence.

A continous Recurrence of Birth

"Within the soul, within the body social, there must be - if we are to experience long survival - a continuous "recurrence of birth" (palingenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death.  For it is by means of our own victories, if we are not regenerated, that the work of Nemesis is wrought:  doom breaks from the shell of our every virtue.  Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence is a snare.  When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except to be crucified - and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero With a Thousand Faces

Interesting on several levels, not the least of which is political.
Primarily suggestive, though, on the topic which occupies my mind a great deal these days - enduring to the end, or maintaining and extending that which is gained by being born again.
  

Social Rebirth

"As Professor Arnold J. Toynbee indicates in his six-volume study of the laws of the rise and disintegration of civilizations, schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements.  Only birth can conquer death - the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero With A Thousand Faces

Some things to chew on here for those of us with an interest in the topic of Zion

Submission - Parallel Readings

My last post gives Campbell's description of the "tyrant-monster" within us all.  Campbell contrasts him with this -

"The hero is the man of self-achieved submission."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces

"...the X factor that distinguishes truly great leaders is not personality but a paradoxical combination of humility and will in service to a cause bigger than the personal ambitions of that leader."

Kethledge and Erwin
Lead Yourself First

"Spirituality, our true aim, is the consciousness of victory over self and of communion with the Infinite."

David O. McKay
Conference Report, October 1969

Joseph Campbell on the natural man

"The figure of the tyrant-monster is known to the mythologies, folk traditions, legends, and even nightmares of the world; and his characteristics are everywhere essentially the same.  He is the hoarder of the general benefit.  He is the monster avid for the greedy rights of "my and mine."  The havoc wrought by him is described in mythology and fairy tale as being universal throughout his domain.  This may be no more than his own household, his own tortured psyche, or the lives that he blights with the touch of his friendship and assistance, or it may amount to the extent of his civilization.  The inflated ego of the tyrant is a curse to himself and his world - no matter how his affairs seem to prosper.  Self-terrorized, fear-haunted, alert at every hand to meet and battle back the anticipated aggressions of his environment, which are primarily the reflections of the uncontrollable impulses to acquisition within himself, the giant of self-achieved independence is the world's messenger of disaster, even though, in his mind, he may entertain himself with humane intentions.  Wherever he sets his hand there is a cry (if not from the housetops, then - more miserably - within every heart): a cry for the redeeming hero, the carrier of the shining blade, whose blow, whose touch, whose existence, will liberate the land."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero With A Thousand Faces

Salvation in the height of the age of Freud and Jung

     "Zen in its essence is the art of seeing into the nature of one's own being, and it points the way from bondage to freedom.  By making us drink right from the fountain of life, it liberates us from all the yokes under which we finite beings are usually suffering in this world.  We can say that Zen liberates all the energies properly and naturally stored in each of us, which are in ordinary circumstances cramped and distorted so that they find no adequate channel for activity.
     This body of ours is something like an electric battery in which a mysterious power latently lies.  When this power is not properly brought into operation, it either grows mouldy and withers away, or is warped and expresses itself abnormally.  It is the object of Zen, therefore, to save us from going crazy or being crippled.  This is what I mean by freedom, giving free play to all the creative and benevolent influences inherently lying in our hearts."

D. T. Suzuki,
Zen Buddhism, 1956 (interestingly enough, William Barrett wrote the intro)

"Myths of the heroes are cosmic creation myths in microcosm.  They depict, in no matter how subtle variation, the eternal battle we wage to release the creative energies within ourselves and in the world. 
     In direct opposition to traditional fertility rites, man's perennial preoccupation with the heroes' quest has to do, above all, with the quality of life to be lived, rather than its quantity.
     Not only has our insatiable search to become more fully integrated been mirrored in multiple forms in diverse cultures and eras but, to this very day, we comprehend what has been expressed only partially...."

Dorothy Norman
The Hero: Myth/Image/Symbol, 1969

"The unconscious sends all sorts of vapors, odd beings, terrors and deluding images up into the mind - whether in dream, broad daylight or insanity; for the human kingdom, beneath the floor of the comparatively neat little dwelling that we call our consciousness, goes down into unsuspected Aladdin caves.  There not only jewels but also dangerous jinn abide: the inconvenient or resisted psychological powers that we have not thought or dared to integrate into  our lives.  And they may remain unsuspected, or, on the other hand, some change word, the smell of a landscape, the taste of a cup of tea, or the glance of an eye may touch a magic spring, and then the dangerous messengers begin to appear in the brain.  These are dangerous because they threaten the fabric of the security into which we have built ourselves and our family.  But they are fiendishly fascinating too, for they carry the keys that open the whole realm of the desired and feared adventure of the discovery of self.  Destruction of the world that we have built and in which we live, and or ourselves within it; but then a wonderful reconstruction, of the bolder, cleaner, more spacious, and fully human life - that is the lure, the promise and terror, of these disturbing night visitants from the mythological realm that we carry within."

Joseph Campbell
The Hero with a Thousand Faces, 1949