Joseph Campbell and the Power of Myth; 104; Sacrifice and Bliss

The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy our cellless sky, the land, the idea is strange to us. Every part of this earth is sacred to my people. Every shining pine needle, every sandy shore, every mist in the dark woods, every meadow, all our holy and the memory and experience of my people. We're part of the earth and it is part of us. The perfumed flowers are our sisters, the bear, the deer, the great eagle. These are our brothers. Each ghostly reflection in the clear water of the lakes tells of events and memories in

the life of my people. The water's murmur is the voice of my father's father. The rivers are our brothers. They carry our canoes and feed our children. If we sell you our land, remember that the air is precious to us, that the air shares it's spirit with all the life it supports. The wind that gave our grandfather his first breath also receives his last sigh. This we know, the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that the United States all. And it not weaves the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself. Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? What will happen when the secret corn is of the forest, a heavy with a cent of many men? And the view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires.

The end of living in the beginning of survival. When the last red man has vanished with his wilderness and his memory is only the shadow of a cloud moving across the prairie, will these shores and forests still be here? Will there be any spirit of my people left? We love this earth as a newborn loves its mother's heartbeat. So if we sell you our land, love it as we've loved it, care for it as we've cared for it. Hold in your mind the memory of the land as it is when you receive it. Live the land for all children and love it as God loves us all. One thing we know, there's only one God. No man, be he red man or white man, can be a part. We are brothers after all. Joseph Campbell, reading the famous speech said to have been delivered in 1854 by the Native

American Visionary Chief Seattle. Campbell immersed himself in the mythology of American Indians, their language, stories and rituals. He felt a kinship with their understanding of the covenant between human beings and nature and a cord based on reverence and respect required by the reality that we humans live all our environment and not just in it. He often told the story of the young Su Indian blackout who provided us with one of the great insights into the power of myth and symbols to change how we see the world. In a state of ecstasy, blackout saw himself on the central mountain of the world and it turned out to be hearty peak in South Dakota and then he said, but the central mountain is everywhere. In other words, every one of us is on a sacred site if only we recognize it. You will hear Joseph Campbell expound on that story later in this broadcast and you will

I believe understand why he wanted every new generation to rediscover the power of myth to awaken in all of us a sense of wonder at the world around us. When we met for these conversations, he was working on a monumental multi-volume historical atlas of world mythology. In this and all his work, he took his inspiration from the English port and mystic William Blake who said, arise and drink your bliss for everything that lives is holy. What does it mean to have a sacred place? This is a term I like to use now as an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room or a certain hour a day or so where you do not know what was in the newspapers that morning. You don't know who your friends are.

You don't know what you owe to anybody. You don't know what anybody owes to you, but a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation and first you may find that nothing is happening there. But if you have a sacred place and use it and take advantage of it, something will happen. This place does for you what the planes did for the hunter. For them the whole thing with a sacred place, do you see? But most of our action is economically or socially determined and does not come out of our life. I don't know whether you've had the experience I've had, but as you get older, the claims of the environment upon you are so great that you hardly know where the hell you are. What is it you intended?

You're always doing something that is required of you. This minute, that minute, another minute. Where is your bliss station? Try to find it. Get a phonograph and put on the records, the music that you really love. Even if it's corny music that nobody else respects, the one that you like or the book you want to read, get it done and have a place in which to do it, then get the thou feeling of life. These people had it for the whole world that they were living in. We talked about the effect of the spreading plane on mythology. This plane clearly bounded by a circular horizon with that grapefruit dome of an exalting heaven above hawks and eagles hovering, the blazing sun passing, the night moon rising.

And I can see the effect on people's stories of that. But what about the people who lived in the dense foliage of the jungle? Total transformation of environment and of psychology and everything else. No horizon. No horizon. No dome of the sky. A lot of birds up there and a heavy vegetation underneath with scorpions and supporters' serpents and the in-between distances of trees, trees, trees. No sense of perspective. Colin Turnbull tells us a marvelous story of picking me out of the forest. He brings this pick me who'd never been out of the jungle onto a mountain top and suddenly they come over the hill and there's an extensive plane out there and the poor little followers utterly terrified.

Had no way of judging perspective and distance, he thought that the animals grazing on the plane out there was so small that they were ants that they were just across the way and so forth. It just totally baffled the brushes back into the farm. You have a different mythology there. You have a different relationship to the hunt and everything else. The forest is home. You are at home in the forest where you and I would be perhaps ill at ease thinking what's behind that tree and all this kind of thing. The sense of the beautiful, simple delight in their forest and their deity is the master, the forest, the forest master. What impresses me is that these people, the hunters and the searchers for the roots and for the berries, they're participating in their landscape. They are part of that world. Absolutely.

And it becomes sacred to them. Places. Every feature of it does. Every moderns are stripping the world of its natural revelations of nature. I know it. I think of that. You remember that wonderful, pygmy legend of the little boy who finds the song of the most beautiful, the bird of the most beautiful song in the forest? And he brings his home, doesn't he? And he asks his father to bring food for the bird and the father doesn't want to feed only a bird. And one time the father kills the bird and when he killed the bird he killed his own life and he died, doesn't it? That's it. And the legend says, the man killed the bird and with the bird he killed the song and with the song himself. I mean, isn't that a story about what happens when human beings destroy their environment, destroy their world, destroy nature in the revelation of their own nature? Human nature too.

They kill the song. They kill the song. And isn't mythology the story of the song? And mythology is the song. It's the flight of the imagination inspired by the energies of the body and in its life. What happened as human beings turn from the hunting of animals to the planting of seeds? What happened to the mythic imagination? Well, I'm trying to think of it this way. An animal, as I think I've said before, is sort of a total entity. And when you kill that animal, that animal is dead. But when you cut down a plant, new sprouts come out. Pruning is, you know, helpful to a plant. Also in forests where a good deal of the origination of myth has to be recognized. A lot of rot comes life, even in these forests here of the beautiful redwood. So I was in wonderful forests right in the immense Sino.

And there there are some great, great stumps from enormous trees that were cut down some decades and decades ago. And out of them I come in these bright new little children who are part of the same plant. So there's a sense of death as not death somehow, that death is required for a new fresh life and so on. And the individual isn't quite an individual. He is a member of a plant. Jesus uses the term, you know, where he says, I am the vine and you are the branches. That vineyard idea is a totally different one from the separate entity of the animal. And this makes a difference in the stories you tell them. How the hell is feeling about what life is? What stories did this experience of the plant are give rise to your favorite stories in plant development?

Well, the cutting up and burial and then growing of the plant world, the world of the plant that you eat being already a cut up dead body is the dominant motif I would say in most of the tales. It occurs all over the place, particularly in the Pacific cultures and in the Americas. Tell me that story of the origin of Mays as long fell apart and borrowed it from the shipwrest in New York, the Argonquin. Well, it's an Argonquin story and it is simply of the boy in his vision. He sees a young man come to him with plumes on his head and a green and so forth. And the visitant invites the young man to a wrestling match and allows them to win, wins and wins. This happens three or four times, but he tells them, the last time I come, you must kill me and bury me and take care of the place where you will bury me. And the boy then, in the last one, actually does what he has been told to do, plants the

man, the visitant and in time comes back and sees the corn growing. And it was a boy who had been concerned for his father who was a hunter but old and he was thinking, isn't there some other way to get food besides this one? And so it came to him out of his intentions, a lovely story. Some other way of getting food than hunting, but the idea is that this visitor, this figure in the vision has to die and be buried before the plant can grow from the remains of his body. And that's the main theme. It comes up, I mean, almost the duplicate of this one through our Polynesia, for instance. Well, there's one in Polynesia about the legend of the maiden Hina. You remember that one? Well, all of the legends in the Polynesian area have been made named Hina and she's associated with the moon and the death and resurrection of the moon is a dominant theme.

What happens to her in this legend? Well, the girl who loves to bathe in a certain pool and there's a great eel that is swimming around in the pool and day after day, he scrapes across her thigh as she's bathing and then one fine, lovely day turns into a young man. And he becomes her lover for a moment and then goes away and comes back again and back again. And then one time when he comes, he says, just as the Algonquin visited, now next time I come to visit you, you must kill me and cut off my head and bury my head. And she does so and the gross from the buried head, a coconut tree. And when you pick coconut and look at the coconut, you can see it's just the size of the head and you can see eyes and things and the little nodules that simulate the head.

So what you have is the same story, springing up in cultures unrelated to each other. What is it saying? Well, to such an extent that it's stunning and after years and years and years of reading these things, I am still overwhelmed at the similarities in cultures that are far far apart. There are two explanations of this. One explanation is that the human psyche is essentially the same all over the world. It is the inward aspect of the human body, which is essentially the same all over the world with the same organs, with the same instincts, with the same impulse systems, with the same conflicts, the same fears. There is also the counter theory of diffusion. Now first is when agriculture is first developed, let's say, in the Near East or in Southeast Asia. I mean, it is a two big centers in the old world. Then the odds of killing the soil goes forth from this area and along with it goes a mythology that has to do with fertilizing the earth and bringing up the plants, killing the body,

cutting it up, burying it and having the plant come. That myth will go with the agricultural tradition. You won't find it in a hunting culture tradition. So there are historical as well as psychological aspects of this problem. In all of these stories, there is someone dying, a hero dying, in order for life to appear again. What does it say to you? It's a really one story here. This isn't a story. This is a ritual. It's a new guinea. And it's associated with the men's societies in New Guinea and they are horror societies because they really enact the myth of death and resurrection and cannibalistic consumption. And you have the myth there of the buried body and the life coming out of it. This is the basic myth, now we're going to enact it. So here's this sacred field, the drums going and chats going and then pauses and this

went on for three or four or five days on and on and rituals are boring but they just wear you out, you know, and then you break through to something else. Then comes the great moment, the young boys who were being initiated into manhood were now to have their first sexual experience. There was a great shed of enormous logs supported by two uprights over here and the young woman comes in all ornamented as a deity and she is brought to lie down in this place beneath the great roof. And the boys then with the drums going and chanting going on, one after another they're about six boys have first permitted a public intercourse with the girl and when the last

boy is with her in full embrace, the supports are withdrawn, the logs drop and a couple are killed. There is the union of male and female again as they were in the beginning before the separation took place, there is the union of beginning and death again and they're both the same thing. The little pair pulled out and roasted and eaten right that evening and acting the myth in its essential character. You can't beat that in the truth to what's the sacrifice of the mass. One of the wonderful things in the Catholic ritual is going to the community that you're taught that this is the body and blood of the Savior and you take it to you and you turn inward and there he's working within you. The truth to which the ritual point is.

The nature of life itself has to be realized in the acts of life. When in the hunting culture as a sacrifice is made it is as it were a gift, a bribe as it were to the deity that is being invited to do something for us or to give us something. Then a figure is sacrificed in the planning culture that figure is the God. The person who died was buried and became the food is Christ crucified from whose body the food of the spirit comes. There is a sublimation of what originally was a very solid, vegetal image. He is on holy road, the tree. He is himself the fruit of the tree. Jesus is the fruit of eternal life which was on the second tree in the Garden of Eden. When man had eaten of the fruit of the first tree, the tree of the knowledge of good and

evil, he was said to have been expelled from the Garden. He had already expelled himself from the Garden. The Garden is the place of unity, non-duality, non-duality of male and female, non-duality of man and God, non-duality of good and evil. You eat the duality and you are on the way out. This tree of the non-duality is the tree of the exit. The tree of coming back to the Garden is the tree of immortal life where you know that I and the Father are one and the two that seem to become one again. And this is exactly the tree under which the Buddha sits. The tree of the life of the knowledge of immortal life and the Buddha under history and Christ hanging on history are the same image. They are the same image. The one who has died to the flesh and been reborn in the spirit. This is an essential experience of any mystical realization.

You die to your flesh and are born to your spirit. You identify yourself with the consciousness and life of which your body is but the vehicle. You die to the vehicle and become identified in your consciousness with that of which the vehicle is the carrier, do you understand me? And that is the God. So that what you get in the vegetation traditions is this notion of identity behind the surface display of duality, identity behind it all, all of these are manifestations of the one. The one radiance shines through all things. The function of art in a way is to reveal through the object here the radiance and that's what you get when you see the beautiful organization of a fortunately composed work of art. You just say, aha, somehow it speaks to the order in your own life. This is a realization through art of the very thing that the religions are concerned to render.

That death is life and life is death and that's the truth. It is. You are in a court. You have to have a balance between death and life. There are two aspects of the same thing which is being becoming and that's in all of these stories. All of them. I don't know one, but where death is rejected. This idea of sacrifice is so foreign to our world today. Well, the old idea of being sacrificed is not what we think at all. Just consider it. I think the great model of sacrifice is the Mayan Indian ball game. You know, they had a kind of basketball game, it was a loop there up in the stadium ball and the idea was to get this big heavy ball through that. I don't know how they did it with their shoulders, they had something or other and the captain of the winning team was sacrificed on the field by the captain of the losing team.

His head was cut off. The going to your sacrifice as the winning stroke of your life is the essence of the early sacrificial idea. There's a wonderful story that I found in the Jesuit relations, you know, the Jesuits here in the 17th century as missionaries up in Canada and the Northern New York state and so forth. Of a young iraquat boy who had just been captured by the Huran, so perhaps it was the other way around I've forgotten. And he was being brought to be tortured to death, the northeast Indians engaged in a systematic torture which would go on for a long time and the idea was to be sustained with a smile without flinching that was it, that was real manhood. But the boy is brought to this as though he were being brought to his wedding. He is singing and the people with him are treating him as though he were his hosts and he was the honored guest and he played the game with them knowing where he was going.

And the priests describing the thing are absolutely bewildered by the situation. And they say that the mockery of this kind of hospitality for people who are then going to become the broods, no, those people were the priests. And this was the sacrifice of the altar. And that boy was Jesus, you know, by analogy. And the priest every day is celebrating mess which is an imitation or repetition actually of the sacrifice of the cross. That's what this priest was witnessing. And but then you have it also in the acts of John, Jesus, before going to crucified. The Jesus dance, that's one of the most beautiful passages in the Christian tradition. In the Matthew, Mark, Luke and John Gospels, it's simply mentioned that we sang a hymn and Jesus went forth. Well here you have the whole hymn described in a ring. Jesus in the center saying, join hands and we'll sing and we'll dance.

And he says, I am this, I am that, I am so forth, so forth, amen, amen. Oh my God, it's grand. And then he walks out to be crucified. Then you go to your death that way as a God, you are going to your eternal life. What's sad about that? Let's make it great. And they do. The God of death is the Lord of the dance. The God of death is the Lord of sex at the same time. What do you mean? It's a marvelous thing. One, after another, you can see these gods, gay day, the God of the death, God of the Haitian voodoo is also the sex god. Votan had one eye covered in the other, uncovered, usually. And at the same time was the Lord of life, Osiris, the Lord of death and the Lord of the generation of life. It's a basic theme that which dies is wrong. You have to have death in order to have life. Now this is the origin thought really of the headhunt in Southeast Asia and particularly

in the Indonesian zone, the headhunt right up to now has been a sacred act. It's a sacred killing. Unless there is death that cannot be birthed and a young man before he can be permitted to marry and become a father must have gone forth and had his kill. What is it, Satan? Well, that every generation has to die in order that the next generation should come. As soon as you begin or give birth to a child, you are the dead one. The child is the new life and you are simply the protector of that new life. Your time is coming. Yeah. Well, that's why there is this deep psychological association of beginning and dying. Isn't there some relationship between what you're saying and this fact that a father will give his life for his son, a mother will give her life for his child? There's a wonderful paper. I don't know whether you knew that I would love to have talked to this point.

There's a wonderful paper by Schopenhauer who is one of my three favorite philosophers called the Foundation of Morality. There he asks exactly the question that you've asked. How is it that a human being can so participate in the peril or pain of another that without thought spontaneously? He sacrifices his own life to the other. How can this happen that what we normally think of as the first law of nature, namely self-preservation, is suddenly dissolved and there's a breakthrough? In Hawaii, some four or five years ago there was an extraordinary adventure that represents this problem. There's a place there called the Pali where the winds from the north, the trade winds from the north come breaking through a great bridge of rocks and of mountain. They come through with a great blast of wind.

The people like to go up there to get their hair blown around and so forth, or to commit suicide, like jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge. Well the police car was on the way up the early little road that used to go up there and they saw just beyond the railing that keeps cars from rolling over. One man actually clearly about to jump and prepare himself to jump. Police cars stopped. The police man on the right jumps out to grab the boy and grabs him just as he jumped and was himself being pulled over and would have gone over. The second cop hadn't gotten around, grabbed him and pulled the two of them back. There was a long description of this. It was a marvelous thing in the newspapers at that time. And the policeman was asked, why didn't you let go? You have lost your life and you see what happened to that man. This is what's known as one-pointed meditation. Everything else in his life dropped off. His duty to his family, his duty to his job, his duty to his own career, all of his wishes

and hopes for life just disappeared and he was about to go. And his answer was, I couldn't let go. If I had, and I'm quoting almost word for word, if I had let that young man go, I could not have lived another day of my life. How come? Shopenhauer's answer is, this is the breakthrough of a metaphysical realization that you and the other are one. And that the separateness is only an effect of the temporal forms of sensibility of time and space. And true reality is in that unity with all life. It is a metaphysical truth that becomes spontaneously realized because it's the real truth of your life. Now you might say, the hero is the one who has given his physical life, you might say,

to some order of realization of that truth. It may appear that I'm one with my tribe or I'm one with people of a certain kind or I'm one with life. This is not a concept. This is a realization. Do you see what I mean? No explaining. And the concepts of love your neighbor know how to put you in tune with that fact, but whether you love your neighbor or not, being the thing grabs you and you do this thing. You don't even know who it is. That policeman didn't know who that young man was. Shopenhauer says, in small ways, you can see this happening every day all the time. This is a theme that can be seen moving life in the world. People doing nice things for each other. What do you think has happened to this mythic idea of the hero in our culture today? It comes up in an experience.

I think I remember during the Vietnam War scene on the television, the young men in helicopter is going out to rescue one of their companions at great risk to themselves. They didn't have to rescue that young man. That's the same thing working. It puts them in touch with the experience of being alive, going to the office every day. You don't get that experience, but suddenly you're ripped into being alive and life is pain and life is suffering and life is horror. But by God you're alive and it's spectacular. This is a case of being alive, rescuing that young man. But I also know a man who said once, after years of standing on the platform of the subway, I die a little bit down there every day, but I know I'm doing so for my family. There are small acts of heroism that occur without regard to the nobility of the notoriety that you're track for it.

That's right. And the mother does it by the oscillation she endures in behalf of the family of her age. Motherhood is in sacrifice. On our veranda in Hawaii, there are little birds that come, the gene likes to feed. And each year there have been one or two mothers, mother birds, and if you have ever seen a mother bird plagued by her progeny, it's for food that the mother should regurgitate their meal to them. And the two of them are five of them. In one case, flopping all over this poor little mother, but they bigger than she, in some cases, you just think, well, this is the symbol of motherhood. This is just giving of your substance and everything to this progeny. This should be it in marriage, a marriage is a relationship. When you make a sacrifice in marriage, you're not sacrificing to the other, you're sacrificing to the relationship. And this is symbolized, for example, in that Chinese image of the daichi, the dao, you

know, with the dog and the light interacting, it's a well-known sign. That is the relationship of young and young male and female, which is what a marriage is. And that's what you are. You know, along to this, you're the relationship. And so marriage, I would say, is not a love affair, it's an ordeal, and the ordeal is sacrifice of ego to the relationship of a tunas, which now becomes the one. One not only, biologically, but spiritually, and primarily spiritually, primarily spiritually. But the necessary function of marriage in order to create our own images and perpetuate ourselves and children. But it's not the primary one. No, that's really just the elementary aspect of marriage. There are two completely different stages of marriage. First is the youthful marriage, following the wonderful impulse, you know, that nature

has given us in the interplay of the sexes biologically, and then the reproduction of children. But the coming to time when the child graduates from the family and the family is left, I've been amazed at the number of my friends who, in their 40s or 50s, go apart, who have had a perfectly decent life together with the child, but they interpreted their union in terms of relationship through the child. They did not interpret it in terms of their own personal relationship to each other. Utterly incompatible with the idea of doing one's own thing. It's not one's own thing, you see. It is, in a sense, one's own thing, but the one isn't just you, it's the two together. And that's a purely mythological image of the sacrifice of the visual, visible entity for a transcendent unit, cracking eggs to make an omelette, you know.

And by denying the right person, we reconstruct the image of the incarnate God, and that's what marriage is. The right person, how does one choose the right person? Your heart tells you what ought to. Your inner being. That's the mystery. You recognize your other self. Well, I don't know, but there's a flash that comes and you're something and you know that this is the one. What has mythology told you about death? What do you think about death? Well, the way, if one can identify with the consciousness of which the body is a vehicle, and really achieve an identification with the consciousness of which the body is a vehicle, not knowing what it is, undifferentiated consciousness, one can let the body go. I like what I heard of Woody Allen, you know, I'm not afraid to die, I just don't want

to be there when it happens. You can have disengaged yourself from the body and not be there, you might say. And yet you know from myth and nature that the body dies, it rots, we're back to the beginning of the world. You expect it, growing old, I mean, you know what's happening, the body is rotting, it's dying, it's losing its energy, there's more mass than energy here, and the identification then with the life which in a plant survives pruning, cutting, and even eating the plant is right back there again, is a, might say, a biological image that is metaphorical of this spiritual mystery. There's a wonderful report of the Indians riding into the rain of bullets from Custard's men, and they're saying, it's a good day to die. It's a great day to die, they're not hanging on.

That's the message of the myth. You, as you know yourself, are not the final term of your being. And you must die to that one way or another, giving of yourself to something or in being annihilated actually physically, to return, you might say, or to recognize. Life is always on the edge of death, always, and one should lack fear and have the courage of life. That's the principal initiation of all of the heroic stories. What's the central story? Do you have a story that's central to this? The Surgauan and the Green Knight. The Green Knight, Arthur's Cod is in session, and there rides into the Cod on a great big green horse, a giant knight.

And the knight says, I have a challenge. I have an adventure. I challenge anyone here to come down here and take this great big axe and cut my head off. And then one year from today, meet me at a Green Chapel, and tell them roughly where the Green Chapel is, and I'll cut his head off. And the only knight who had the courage to accept this curious invitation was going. And the knight gets off his horse, takes out his neck, it goes in, comes down with his axe, and there's the head. And then the knight stands up, picks up the head, gets on the horse, and rides off, says, I'll see you in a year. Well, that year, everybody was very generous to go in, and he rides off for the year. As the day approaches, he finds himself before a little hunter's cabin. And he thinks he likes advice here as to where the Green Chapel is, and tells them I've got to be there in three days.

And the hunter greets him, and Gawain tells his story, and the hunter says, well, it's the Green Chapel. He's just down the way here. It's about a couple hundred yards. And why don't you just spend the next three days with us, and we'll entertain you, and then you go to this adventure. All right, very well. So the hunter says, well, I've got to go out for the day to hunt. And he says, you'll spend the night with us, and then in the morning, I'll go forth, and in the evening, I'll come back, and I'll give everything I will have got during the day to you, and you give to me what you will have got during the day. But in the morning, the hunter rides off, and Gawain's in bed, and in comes the hunter's gorgeous, beautiful wife. And she tickles Gawain's chin, and invites him to love. Well he's an Arthurian knight, a knight of Arthur's court, and to betray his host is the last thing that a knight can submit to.

So he resists this woman, and she's very, very aggressive, and he's very, very stern in his position. And finally, she says, well, let me give you a kiss, anyhow. So she gives him one big smack, and that's that. In the evening, the hunter comes back with a great haul of games, throws it in the floor, and Gawain gives him a kiss, and they laugh, and that's that. Second morning, a similar event, the wife comes in, and Gawain gets two kisses. And the hunter comes back with about half as much gain, and he gets two kisses. They laugh, and that's that. The third morning, the wife comes in. Now here's a man about to meet his death. He's about to have his head chopped off, the beautiful woman, the last moment of the possibility of this wonderful fulfillment. And again, he resists, she gives him three kisses and her daughter, and she says, this will protect you against any danger. The hunter comes home with just one silly, smelly fox throws down the ground, and he gets

three kisses, but no gawder. So comes the time now to go and have your head chopped off. Do you see what the tests are of the night here? One is sex, you know, lust, and the other is courage. So he approaches the chapel, the green chapel with the green knight whom he's about to encounter, and then he hears the knight whetting this great knight, this great axe. He comes to it, and the knight is there, certainly, the great big green following, he greets him, and says, okay, put your leg out there on this block, and I'll chop your head off. And he lifts the axe, he says, no, stretch out a little more, he says, there's three times, and then the axe comes down and just cuts his neck a little bit. The green knight says, that's the gawder. Well this is the art of the night, so the gawder, here's the knight who really transcended

the two great temptations, fear of death, and lust for sex and the joys of life. In the moral? And the moral is that the realization of your bliss, your true being, comes when you have put aside the, what might be called, passing moment with its terror and with its temptations and its statement of requirements of life that you should live this way. What is that story about, and I forget where it comes from, about the camel and then the lion and along the way you lose the burden of youth? So three transformations of the spirit, that's Nietzsche, that's the prologue to Lusbeck's Arthur Strah.

Tell me that story. When you are a child, when you are young and young person, you are a camel. The camel gets down on its knees and says, put a load on me. This is obedience. This is receiving the instruction and information that your society knows you must have in order to live a competent life. When the camel is well loaded, he gets up on his feet, struggles to his feet, and runs out into the desert where he becomes transformed into a lion. The heavier the load, the more powerful the lion. The function of the lion is to kill a dragon, and the name of the dragon is thou shalt. And on every scale of the dragon, there is a thou shalt imprinted. Some of it comes from 2,000 years, 4,000 years ago. Some of it comes from yesterday morning's newspaper headline.

When the dragon is killed, the lion is transformed into a child. An innocent child living out of its own dynamic. And Nietzsche uses the term, an out-sick, roll-in disorder, a wheel rolling out of its own center. That's what you become. That is the mature individual. The thou shalt is a civilizing force. It turns a human animal into a civilized human being. But then the one who is thrown off the thou shalt is still a civilized human being. You see, he has been humanized, you might say, by the thou shalt system. So his performance now as a child is not simply childlike at all. He has assimilated the culture and thrown it off as a thou shalt. But this is the way in any artwork. You go to work and study an art. You study the techniques. You study all the rules.

And the rules are put upon you by a teacher. Then there comes a time of using the rules, not being used by them. Do you understand what I'm saying? So one way is to follow, I always tell my students, follow your bliss. Follow your bliss. Your bliss, where the deep sense of being informed and going where your body and the soul want to go, when you have that feeling, then stay with it and don't let anyone throw you off. Have you ever read Sinclair Lewis's Babit? Not in a long time. Do you remember the last line? I've never done the thing I wanted to in all my life. Quite a lot. As the man who never followed his bliss. Well I heard that line. I was living in Brunsville when I was teaching at Sarah Lawrence before I was married. I used to be eating out in the restaurants of the town, up from my lunch and dinners. And Thursday night was the main night off in Brunsville, so that all the families were out in the restaurants.

On one fine evening, I was in my favorite restaurant there, it was a Greek restaurant. And at the table, we're sitting a father, a mother, and a scrawny little boy here, about 12 years old. The father says to the boy, drink your tomato juice and the boy says, I don't want to. And the father with a louder voice says, drink your tomato juice. And the mother says, don't make him do what he doesn't want to do. The father looks at her and he says, he can't go through life doing what he wants to do. Said, if he does only what he wants to do, he'll be dead. Look at me. I've never done the thing I wanted to in all my life, like that, my God. That's what happened in Carnot, and that's the man who never followed his bliss. Well, you may have a success in life, but then just think of it.

What kind of life was it? What good is it? You've never done the thing you wanted to in all your life. What happens when you follow your bliss? You come to bliss. This should be it in marriage. I mean, that's the sense of the marriage ceremony. And the Middle Ages of favorite image that occurs in many, many contexts is the wheel of fortune. There's the hub of the wheel and there's the revolving rim of the wheel. And if you are attached to the rim of the wheel, that's, say, fortune, that you will be either above going down at the bottom or coming up. But if you are at the hub, you're in the same place all the time. That's the sense of the marriage vow. You know, I take you in health or sickness, you know, in wealth or poverty, but I take you. And you are my bliss, not the wealth that you might bring me. Know the social prestige, but you.

That's following your bliss. I came to this idea of bliss because in Sanskrit, it's just the great spiritual language of the world, and they know all about it. And I haven't known about it for a long time. The transcendent is transcendent. But there are three terms that bring you to the brink. You might say the jumping off place to the ocean. And the three terms are sat, chit, ananda. And sat, the word sat means being. Chit means full consciousness. And ananda means rapture. So I thought, I don't know whether my consciousness is full consciousness or not. I don't know whether my being is proper being or not. But I do know where my rapture is. So let me hang out a rapture, and that'll bring me both being and full consciousness. And it works.

Well, where's your rapture? Well, I started with Indians, and then it went on into more and more mythological matters and the realm of the arts, music, and when I met Gene, then the dance came in, and this is it. Just stay with that. And one doesn't have to be a poet to do this. Carpenters do it. A poet is simply one who's made a profession and a lifestyle of being in touch with that. Most people have to be concerned with other things. They get themselves involved in economic and other activities, or you're drafted into a war that isn't the one you're interested in. And how to hold to this umbilical, you might say, on those circumstances, that's a technique each one has to work out for themselves somehow.

But most people living in that realm of what might be called occasional concerns, they all have the capacity that's waiting to be awakened, to move to this other place. I know what I've seen it happen in students. Wonderful way of teaching we had at Sarah Lawrence, where I taught for 38 years, I'd have an individual conference with every one of my students, at least once a fortnight for half an hour or so. And there you're talking on about the things that students ought to be reading, and suddenly you hit on something that the student really responds to. You can see the eyes open, the complexion changes, life possibility has opened there. And all you can say to yourself is, I hope this child hangs on to that, you know, they may or may not. But when they do, they've found a life right there in the room with you. How would you advise somebody to tap that spring of eternal life, that joy, that is right

there? Well, we're having experiences all the time, which may, on occasion, surrender some sense of this, a little intuition of where your joy is, grab it. No one can tell you what it's going to be. I mean, you've got to learn to recognize your own depths. Do you ever have this sense when you're following your bliss as I have in moments of being helped by hidden hands? All the time. It's miraculous. I even have a superstition that has grown on me as the result of invisible hands coming all the time, namely that if you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you're living somehow. And when you can see it, you begin to deal with people who are in the field of your bliss, and they open doors to you.

I say, follow your bliss and don't be afraid, and doors will open where you didn't know they were going to be. You ever have sympathy for the man who has no invisible means of support? Who has no invisible means? Yes, he's the one that evokes compassion, you know, to put a chap and to see him stumbling around when the water that water life is right there is really evokes one's pity. Right there? Right there? You believe that? Yes. The waters of eternal life? Right there. Where? Wherever you are. If you're following your bliss, I mean, you're having that joy, that refreshment, that life is all the time. So

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