"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." (p.8)

"When we... consider the numerous strange rituals that have been reported from the primitive tribes and great civilizations of the past, it becomes apparent that the purpose and actual effect of these was to conduct people across those difficult thresholds of transformation that demand a change in the patterns not only of conscious but also of unconscious life. ... 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 other 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. In the United States there is even a pathos of inverted emphasis: the goal is not to grow old, but to remain young; not to mature away from Mother, but to cleave to her." (pp.10-11)

Robert Bly echoed and amplified this image of Americans trying fiercely to avoid adulthood in The Sibling Society.

"We carry [the unconscious] 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." (p.17)

A compelling description of the goal of Shadow Work®.

"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. The hero has died as a modern man; but as eternal man - perfected, unspecific, universal man - he has been reborn. His second solemn task and deed therefore... is to return then to us, transfigured, and teach the lessons he has learned of life renewed." (pp.19-20)

"Furthermore, we have not even to risk the adventure alone; for the heroes of all time have gone before us; the labyrinth is thoroughly known; we have only to follow the thread of the hero-path. And where we had thought to find an abomination, we shall find a god; where we had thought to slay another, we shall slay ourselves; where we had thought to travel outward, we shall come to the center of our own existence; where we had thought to be alone, we shall be with all the world. ... The passage of the mythological hero may be over-ground, incidentally; fundamentally it is inward - into depths where obscure resistances are overcome, and long lost, forgotten powers are revivified, to be made available for the transfiguration of the world. ... [Now] it appears that the perilous journey was a labor not of attainment but of reattainment, not discovery but rediscovery. The godly powers sought and dangerously won are revealed to have been within the heart of the hero all the time." (pp.25, 29, 39)

What better answer could there be to the question, What is the meaning of life?

The error in shame-based beliefs is that if we look inside, we will see evil there. We will, in fact, find the matter of which we were created, in god's own image.

"The point is that Buddahood, Enlightenment, cannot be communicated, but only the way to Enlightenment." (p.33n)

Campbell is saying the path may be captured, but not the destination, though I think he would agree that the attempt, and dawning realization of its impossibility, are themselves part of the journey.

"Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know." (p.116)

In a similar vein, Jungian analyst Marion Woodman, in her audio book Holding the Tension of the Opposites, draws a connection between the exploration of the shadow and growing worship of the Goddess.

Raised in the Judeo-Christian tradition where God was male, as I approached Jungian paganism I struggled with the inherent unfairness of the deity being either gender exclusively. I think Campbell and Woodman are saying that the deity's gender is beside the point; the part of us that seeks has a masculine quality, and the treasure that part seeks has a feminine one, and each of us encompasses both, just as god models for us both the seeking and the found.

"Totem, tribal, racial, and aggressively missionizing cults represent only partial solutions of the psychological problem of subduing hate by love; they only partially initiate. Ego is not annihilated in them; rather, it is enlarged; instead of thinking only of himself, the individual becomes dedicated to the whole of his society. ... Instead of clearing his own heart the zealot tries to clear the world. The laws of the City of God are applied only to his in-group... while the fire of a perpetual holy war is hurled (with good conscience, and indeed a sense of pious service) against whatever uncircumcised, barbarian, heathen, 'native,' or alien people happens to occupy the position of neighbor." (p.156)

It is comfortable to hear Campbell speaking, 50 years before the Taliban came to power, about Islamic extremists who advocate holy jihad. It is more difficult to admit that every American driving a car when walking would suffice, every American buying disposable furniture, every American using electricity powered by plutonium, is dedicated to a very narrow view of "freedom."

Some would have us believe that we can "clear the world" of terrorists, when it is hard to escape the conviction that every bomb the US drops on an Islamic country multiplies rather than diminishes the numbers of people dedicated to America's destruction.

"There must always remain, however, from the standpoint of normal waking consciousness, a certain baffling inconsistency between the wisdom brought forth from the deep, and the prudence usually found to be effective in the light world. ... How teach again, however, what has been taught correctly and incorrectly learned a thousand thousand times, throughout the millenniums of mankind's prudent folly? That is the hero's ultimate difficult task. How render back into light-world language the speech-defying pronouncements of the dark? ... How translate into terms of 'yes' and 'no' revelations that shatter into meaningless every attempt to define the pairs of opposites? How communicate to people who insist on the exclusive evidence of their senses the message of the all-generating void? ... As dreams that were momentous by night may seem simply silly in the light of day, so the poet and the prophet can discover themselves playing the idiot before a jury of sober eyes." (pp.217-218)

Humankind leaves Eden and thirsts unquenchably for a savior who will return us to paradise. As Campbell writes later, "Where formerly causal bodies were visible, now only their secondary effects come to focus in the little hard-fact pupil of the human eye. The cosmogonic cycle is now to be carried forward, therefore, not by the gods, who have become invisible, but by the heroes, more or less human in character, through whom the world destiny is realized." (p.315)

"It is possible to speak from only one point at a time, but that does not invalidate the insights of the rest." (p.229)

For me, one of the great challenges in writing, as I edit what I've written, is respecting the voice I was using and not merely tossing them out for the sake of the voice I'm using now. I could rewrite the same paragraph endlessly.

"'Whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it.' The meaning is very clear; it is the meaning of all religious practice. The individual, through prolonged psychological disciplines, gives up completely all attachment to his personal limitations, idiosyncrasies, hopes and fears, no longer resists the self-annihilation that is prerequisite to rebirth in the realization of truth, and so becomes ripe, at last, for the great at-one-ment. His personal ambitions being totally dissolved, he no longer tries to live but willingly relaxes to whatever may come to pass in him; he becomes, that is to say, an anonymity." (pp.236-237)

The noble goal of overcoming "ego" can be held with different energies: that of blissful self-annihilation in favor of what Campbell calls The Imperishable, and that of shame in which the self is abandoned, unloved, preyed upon or dishonored.

"Sometimes a fool, sometimes a sage, sometimes possessed of regal splendor; sometimes wandering, sometimes as motionless as a python, sometimes wearing a benignant expression; sometimes honored, sometimes insulted, sometimes unknown - thus lives the man of realisation, ever happy with supreme bliss. Just as an actor is always a man, whether he puts on the costume of his role or lays it aside, so is the perfect knower of the Imperishable always the Imperishable, and nothing else." (p.237)

"Man in the world of action loses his centering in the principle of eternity if he is anxious for the outcome of his deeds, but resting them and their fruits on the knees of the Living God he is released by them, as by a sacrifice, from the bondages of the sea of death." (p.239)

"The hero of yesterday become the tyrant of tomorrow, unless he crucifies himself today. ... Needless to say, the hero would be no hero if death held for him any terror; the first condition is reconciliation with the grave." (p.353, 356)

The hero who stops doing his or her work becomes another example of power corrupting absolutely.

"The mighty hero of extraordinary powers...is each of us: not the physical self visible in the mirror, but the king within. ... In his life-form the individual is necessarily only a fraction and distortion of the total image of man." (p.365, 382)

"...[For] the problem is nothing if not that of rendering the modern world spiritually significant - or rather (phrasing the same principle the other way round) nothing if not that of making it possible for men and women to come to full human maturity through the conditions of contemporary life." (p.388)

In the last paragraphs of the book, Campbell sees humankind's central threat to survival changing through the centuries alongside what it considers the greatest mystery to be explored. The hunter-gatherers focused on the mystery of the animal kingdom and how to share the wilderness. As tribes became agricultural, the central mysteries became the sun, moon, and elements that affected crops. As physics developed laws governing the motion of the spheres, Western science "[descended] from the heavens to the earth" to study human biology and the earth sciences. Writing in the late 40s, Campbell thought that with the dawn of anthropology and psychology, "man himself is now the crucial mystery." We study the differing human characteristics of race, geography, class, or time period that "can be the measure of the inexhaustible and multifariously wonderful divine existence that is the life in all of us."

"The modern hero, the modern individual who dares to heed the call and seek the mansion of that presence with whom it is our whole destiny to be atoned [reconciled] cannot, indeed, must not, wait for his community to cast off its slough of pride, fear, rationalized avarice, and sanctified misunderstanding. 'Live,' Nietzsche says, 'as though the day were here.' It is not society that is to guide and save the creative hero, but precisely the reverse. And so every one of us shares the supreme ordeal - carries the cross of the redeemer - not in the bright moments of his tribe's great victories, but in the silences of his personal despair." (p.391)

See also Books and CDs We Recommend, a bibliography of books, CDs and tapes related to personal growth and spirituality, at the Shadow Work® Seminars site.

• List of books.
  
• Tell a friend about this page
• Healing Space home page.