Why did our political leaders bail out banks (who caused the GFC) rather than the public (who lost wealth and jobs as a result)? Why did governments spend trillions of dollars repairing a system that, in the well-known cycle of booms and busts, is destined to crash once again? Why are they bandaiding problems caught up in a powerbroker system that is visibly failing, rather than following the advice of economists like Joseph Stiglitz, who suggest seizing the opportunity for reform? Why do our political leaders seem to support “Shareholder Capitalism” rather than investigating the process of moving toward a “Socialised Capitalism” that might be more constructive?
As the Occupy Wall St movement spreads across the world, people are questioning a number of aspects of our system that they previously left unexamined. One of those is the assumption that Capitalism as we know it today is the only version of Capitalism that is possible. While economists recognize the varieties of Capitalism that exist throughout the world, the varieties can be less visible to the average human eye.
The thing is, the Global Capitalist model as we know it today, that emphasizes neo-liberal policy, provides little regulation to banks and financial industries, and disconnects shareholder profit and public loss, is by no means a fixed and final version of the Capitalist model. In fact, it is clear that such a form of Capitalism is destined for ongoing collapse. In short, it’s time for reform.
What does a shift from “shareholder capitalism” to “socialised capitalism” involve? The Australian School of Business article that inspired this blog entry suggests this shift would involve a move from short-term speculation to long-term investments, from huge corporations to family-owned companies. ‘The differentiating factor lies in the allocation of resources‘. [1]
“Make no mistake,” Andrew Kakabadse explains, “both ideas are market-driven… which is either in short-term deals driven by cash flow to cater to the few or in infrastructure and highly innovative family businesses that deliver long-term wealth to society as a whole. Nobody takes notice of this second model, which has by far the greatest wealth creation potential in the world, despite everything that is happening”.[1]
Hang on a second, which creates the most wealth? What’s more appealing then, shareholder capitalism or socialised capitalism??? Isn’t it in our favour to create more wealth, not less?
I don’t know the pragmatic details of how such a shift could be actualized. How could you stop short-term speculation (derivatives, hedge bets etc) deals going down? How could governments encourage a move from corporation to family-owned companies? How can resources be reallocated to promote a more people-friendly system? It is too late at night, and I’m too tired from recent adventures in Chicago, DC and car accidents (which I’ll blog about soon), for me to contemplate such answers. I will therefore conclude with my take-away message from this article, that some kind of “socialised capitalism” is an appealing direction to be heading… do you agree?
If you’re not in Sydney (like me) or can’t make it to protest, you can still spread the word about this peaceful protest to change the rules of our global capitalist game.
Stop banks and corporations:
– reducing humans to commodities
– controlling media
– funding both sides of wars
– destroying the environment
Occupy Adelaide: http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=138387406259689Occupy Sydney acknowledges the Traditional Indigenous Eora peoples’ custodianship of the land upon which many Australian’s now live and work – the place the world knows as Sydney – and the genocide perpetrated against that people by the colonists from whose occupation the current governments claimed right to govern descends. Occupy Sydney also acknowledges that such #humanrights crimes of genocide continue to be committed against aboriginal peoples across Australia today- in particular the Northern Territory Intervention, a racist bilaterally supported denial of humanrights and cultural genocide which continues today.
What is #OccupyWallSt? Who are the 1%? Why did it take the media so long to report on it? What do protestor’s want? Are they trying to bring down The Pyramid? Will they succeed?
I am teaching a class on the Philosophy of War and Peace in North Carolina, with a specific focus on the Arab Spring. Yet here in America I might be witnessing the greatest revolution of them all: the “OccupyWallSt” movement, and its children.
When I showed RapNews to students a few weeks ago, I had no idea that it would become prophetically true:
People have been camping out in Zuccotti Park (formerly “Liberty Plaza Park”) for almost a month, and yet the media in America only started reporting on it just over a week ago. Why?
What is “OccupyWallSt”?
OccupyWallSt (and OccupyChicago, OccupySydney, OccupySeasameSt etc) are peaceful protests against the foothold that corporations have over the state of global affairs including economic injustices, environmental destruction, providing weapons to both sides of wars, controlling the media and making politicians their puppets.
Like the Arab Spring, the demonstrations don’t have a leader. It began with 1000 people walking down the street,and 100-200 sleeping in the park. The idea was originally proposed in an Adbusters (an advertisement-free, anti-consumerist Canadian magazine), who suggested protesting against the lack of holding Wall St responsible for their actions re the global financial crisis, global poverty and their pervasive influence on democracy.
Why did the media take so long to report?
Because the media is owned by corporations, of course.
What do protestor’s want?
I will be able to answer this question much better in a couple of week’s time, after I visit Chicago and Washington DC, and even more so after Thanksgiving when I visit NYC… but for now, this is what I can gauge:
Protestors are holding signs like:
“I am a human being, not a commodity”
“I will believe corporations are people when Georgia executes one of them”
“Money for jobs & housing NOT banks & war”
“We are the 99 percent”
Nobel prizewinning economist Joseph Stiglitz and Jeff Madrick (former economics columnist for the New York Times and author of Age of Greed: The Triumph of Finance and the Decline of America) recently spoke with Wall Street about what caused the global financial crisis. On Australia’s ABC, Peter Lloyd interviews Jeff Madrick click here. Despite the mainstream media’s attempts to make out the protest is “inefffective action”[4], Madrick says that “The fact is the gut feelings of these people or the informed feelings of some of them because there are a lot of educated people there, are essentially correct. They are correct that Wall Street was the principal cause of the great recession, that greed and outrageous pay was a principal cause and that Washington has not properly dealt with it…”[5]
There is talk of the protest being the left wing response to the “Tea Party”, with one big difference. Madrick notes “These people don’t march to one drummer like the disciplined Tea Party. These people think for themselves, have independent frustrations, have independent agendas.”[5]
Who are the 1%?
According to the Washington Post the top 1 percent are those American households who “had a minimum income of $516,633 in 2010 — a figure that includes wages, government transfers and money from capital gains, dividends and other investment income.” [2] Their average wealth was $14 million in 2009 (down from a $19.2 million peak in 2007).[2]
Documentaries like Inside Job names and shames some of the 1% who were responsible for the Global Financial Crisis (GFC).
The rest of us! Anyone who makes less than $516,633 a year.The 99% are the ones who paid (and are still paying) for the GFC. The 99% want to work, and there’s lots of work to be done, but there’s no money for them to pay one another because the greedy 1% have sucked it out of the system and put it in their pockets.
Ezra Klein in the Washington Post breaks this down further: “the bottom 60 percent earned a maximum of $59,154 in 2010, the bottom 40 percent earned a max of $33,870, while the bottom 20 percent earned just $16,961 at maximum.” [2]
What influence does money have on politics?
For a simple explanation check out the “Story of Stuff”:
My Master of Peace and Conflict Studies taught me that global politics, economics, military, society and psychology are intertwined and extremely complex. My attention has been drawn to the intersections of growing population, poverty and the ecological predicament they create: (1) For global population to stabilize we must help people at the base of the pyramid out of poverty; (2) We need six Earths to sustain 7 billion people living like Americans and Australians do; (3) Technology will only solve this problem if the people at the top invest in it.
In short, a sustainable habitat and lifestyle for humans requires the priorities of corporations need to change from the legalized goal of profitfor shareholders, to the moral goal of improving the lives ofpeople in the world today and in the future.
Let me recap a useful metaphor: The Pyramid. In Preserving The Pyramid: Why things are the way they are I proposed that things are the way they are because they have been designed this way: poverty, religion, education systems, health-related issues – all of our problems are (at least in part) designed to preserve “The Pyramid”.
Changing laws and priorities isn’t easy, particularly when The Pyramid has guardians around all its walls, protecting the wealth and power of the elites at the top.
Are protester’s trying to bring down The Pyramid?
I don’t think so. It seems to me these protesters are using non-violent conflict to demand a more mobile hierarchy of power, a global social and economic pyramid that doesn’t exploit the people it is supposed to protect. That makes them my heroes.
What can be done?
The power in The Global Pyramid today lies with the bankers and stockmarket – people with a license to print money or make money from nothing – shuffling papers, or giving letting others shuffle papers for them. If shareholders invest to make profit, then companies will continue to put profit before people and our planet. Even if shareholders personally care more about life than money, the system has become bigger than it’s parts.
Madrick gives some more specific suggestions: (1) “get over this obsession with austerity economics”; (2) “reinvest in this economy in significant ways”; (3) “we really need a different regulation scheme for Wall Street”. Unfortunately this latter suggestion, Madrick suggests, “will be very difficult to do given the power and money on Wall Street.”[5]
How can the rules that govern Wall St be updated to prioritize life and our ecosystems over monetary profit? Which laws need to be changed? How can the economy be stimulated without needing to fund both sides of wars? How can Wall Street be better regulated?
Will the #Occupy Movement succeed?
“Can I say this will end in complete victory?” Madrick asks, “No, you can never say that. But it may begin to change public opinion enough to give Congress people in Washington the courage of their own convictions. Many of them are disgusted by what’s happening and can’t get any traction for their own ideas and maybe they will begin to get the courage to come forward… The American establishment has the courage to ask one fundamental question: what is Wall Street for? Do we need a Wall Street that takes 40 per cent of American profits? No way. Let’s rethink that. But the American establishment seems anyway afraid to ask that question and we have to start asking that.”[5]
The protesters give me hope. They are turning words into action, demanding their (and our) basic human rights, they are making peace a verb.
Recently learning about the occupation of Wall Street, I thought it worthwhile to re-post my two cents on ten ways to change the world:
Legally:
1. Change corporation law – redefine “corporation” so that they are NOT treated as separate entities in their own right that can be declared bankrupt in and of themselves. Corporation law must be adjusted to hold shareholders responsible for monetary and non-monetary profits and loss.
2. Change finance / stock market laws – in implementing the above, the ST money market would probably have to go, as would trading Derivatives and Options. The stock exchange would slowdown and be based on long term investments.
3. Change banking laws for money/debt creation and collection – limit their ability to print money via debt, decrease bank’s profits, and maybe all debt cancels after 50 years, I’m not sure. Something needs to be done to regulate them though.
4. Change balance of power in the WB, WTO and IMF – give more votes to the poorer nations and create fairer trade policies
5. Create international tax laws – to crack down on tax havens.
Personally:
6. Philosophically, a self-examination of our values – what makes a life “good”? Two shifts: shift from valuing capital to valuing creativity; and shift from EGO to ECO.
7. Women might reconsider what they find attractive qualities in men – see the attraction of a creative and caring man over a rich and selfish man. Then maybe men will change in suit.
8. Write letters to corporations telling them you won’t buy their product until they stop slave trade and ridiculously low paying 80-hour weeks in sweatshops, and treat their workers in a way they would like to be treated.
9. Public shame of the ridiculously rich – unite in an attempt to decrease the obesity of the rich, and as a consequence decrease the hunger of the poor.
10. See what we might be able to do to campaign to change the laws above.
Essentially I’m talking about setting a limit to the lifestyle of those at the verybottom and verytop to the pyramid.
There’s nothing wrong with inequality – we don’t have to earn the same amount, eat the same amount, live in the same way. But there needs to be limits, on both ends. No one in the world today should go hungry, just as greed bastards at the top shouldn’t avoid paying tax and conduct their business in unethical ways.
A smart friend told me: “if you wanna work smart and hard and eat lobster all the time, and if I wanna work little and eat noodles, then that’s cool. But we both should have food and shelter. It’s just a matter of cutting out the extremes and increasing social mobility between the classes.”
It’s about having the freedom to choose where you will be located within The Pyramid: how much power you want to have (ie how involved in politics, corporate world and media), how much and how hard you want to work, and the lifestyle that you want to live.
I will have more to say about the Wall Street situation soon…
If you are not yet familiar with “The Pyramid”, check out the post Preserving The Pyramid: Why things are the way they are. In short this blog proposes that things are the way they are because they have been designed this way: poverty, religion, education systems, health-related issues – all of our problems are (at least in part) designed to preserve power structure that I metaphorically refer to as “The Pyramid”. Click here to see full post
“Art is the imagination at play in the field of time. Let yourself play.” [1]
Do you ever wonder where your good ideas come from? Have you ever tried tracing them back to their source/s? When you have writer’s block or the equivalent, how do you deal with it? How do you regain your creativity?
Tonight I’m meeting with a group of artists to discuss a book called “The Artist’s Way” by Julia Cameron. One of the first things she mentions is that you can’t teach a person to be creative – you can only teach them to let themselves be creative.
How do you “let yourself be creative”? Where does creativity come from? How can you get more good ideas?
This RSA Animate with Steven Johnson suggests that most ideas come from one small hunch colliding with other small hunches:
“The position of the artist is humble. He is essentially a channel.” Piet Mondrian.
Has there ever been a completely “new” idea or invention that wasn’t connected with already existing ideas and inventions? I don’t think so. I think it’s the nature of our being to continually be in a state of evolution – with now more than ever, small changes and small ideas joining together to make bigger ones, which combine in the ongoing creating and changing of our world. Creativity is something that we channel from all the people, experiences and energies that surround and penetrate us.
I can trace most of my “good ideas” (at least the ideas that I consider “good”) back to conversations and experiences that I wouldn’t have had if it weren’t for friends, family and other people I’ve met. Creativity doesn’t come out of no where, it comes from many places. Out of a network of relationships, ideas evolve and emerge to create something “new”.
I think the way to let these ideas come, the way to let the creativity flow, is to (1) be promiscuous, (2) pay attention, and (3) connect the dots.
(1) Be promiscuous. “Intellectual promiscuity” (as a friend back in Sydney calls it) means reading many different books, hanging out with many different types of people, and learning to see the world through many different lenses. Such promiscuity stimulates creativity.
(2) Pay attention. Take note of what you learn from these sources. What concepts intuitively stand out to you.
(3) Connect the dots. Bringing your notes from above together to create something new.
I may have posted this before, but it’s such a good one I’ll post it again. An RSA Animate – Ken Robinson on how School Kills Creativity:
“Inefficiency is a good thing,” a wise friend informed me six months ago. I must have looked confused.
“When I said this to a room full of corporates, you should have seen the horror on their faces!” My face would have read pretty much the same. Inefficiency is good???
“How?” I asked in almost disbelief.
“Friendship, for example, spending time with people you love. It’s entirely inefficient… All the things in life that are wonderful, involve being inefficient. Think about it: Art. Love. Reflection. Contemplation. These things don’t happen in a rush. They take time. You need to be inefficient.”
But “Time, we say, is money, and, boy, that’s for real!” says Alan Watts, in Does it Matter?:
“Even sex is becoming acceptable for the same reason: it is good for you; it is a healthy, tension–reducing “outlet”—to use Kinsey’s statistical term for counting orgasms—and some wretched hygienist will soon figure out the average person’s minimum daily requirement of outlets (0.428 would be three times a week) so that we can screw with a high sense of duty and freedom from guilt.”
He goes on to explain that: “We get such a kick out of looking forward to pleasures and rushing ahead to meet them that we can’t slow down enough to enjoy them when they come.”
“The heart of the matter is that we are living in a culture which has been hypnotized with symbols—words, numbers, measures, quantities, and images—and that we mistake them for, and prefer them to, physical reality… A culture is hardly a culture at all when it does not provide for the most sophisticated training in the fundamental arts of life: farming, cooking, dining, dressing, furnishing, and love–making. Where these arts are not cultivated with devotion and skill, time to spare and money to spend are useless.”
For someone from a business and economics background, which based on efficiency, this shift from efficiency = bad, can take a while to truly comprehend, and even longer to integrate into one’s life.
Ever since school I’ve judged myself on how much I have “got done”. How many boxes on my to-do list I have ticked. I couldn’t relax till my homework was complete. My day was a good day if it had been an efficient one.
In my first serious relationship it took time for me to adjust. When you are in love, you tend to spend time doing the most inefficient things. You drive out of your way, you sit around watching TV, you talking for hours, you fight and make up. Almost everything you do when in love is inefficient. Each action is unmeasurable. There’s no tick boxes in love.
I did adjust. I learned to be inefficient. It felt good. It forced me to relax.
It was a long relationship, and few years have passed since it ended. Old habits die hard.
Without a reason to be inefficient I ascended or descended, depending how you judge it, back into my more efficient state. All my time became my time again, to do all the things I wanted to do. If I wanted to work a 14-hour day on my research, I could. There was no one else to think about. Just me. So I “followed my bliss”, got myself wrapped up in research, writing and creative projects that I loved doing. I really love these things. Yet in time, efficiency takes its toll.
Sometimes I catch myself on skype, on the phone, or even in person, with friends or family, and I notice my mind wonder off to think about various ideas and projects. At times I find it hard to go out of my way for others. It can be hard to justify a weekend away, time out, reading novels that aren’t teaching me something, spending time doing nothing. Sometimes even yoga feels like a trade-off – I can do yoga or I can do more study, and I choose to do the latter. The worst feeling is when stuck in traffic or waiting in line or in a dead boring conversation – in any situation where time is being wasted – and some part inside me cringes, an inner frustration of time ticking by.
There has to be some way to navigate the efficient and inefficient.
In the short term being efficient might make me happier than ever, feeling satisfied with all I’m accomplishing. But continued in the long term too much efficiency means we miss out on the deeper, the inefficient, relationships and connectivity that we are on this planet to experience. If we aren’t careful, we will be old, grey, bald, fat, and lonely, and life will have passed us by.
After a walk in the nearby mountains, spending time taking photos like the above shot, I wrote some “notes to self”:
Don’t get frustrated when time disappears into nothing.
Put time into friendships without feeling rushed. Be present during that time.
Learn to say yes, no, or later, as fits with what I wants to do. You can’t do everything.
Better to do less and do it less efficiently, then feel like you are your own production line. Times have changed since Henry Ford’s assembly line.
Creativity and quality are assets of the future. Efficiency is the antithesis of creativity.
Meditate. Exercise. Relax. Find your balance.
Cherish quality. Put love into your food. Cultivate the arts. Enjoy… Be inefficient.
It is what one does when they are inefficient that makes life worth living.
Did you know that Eskimos have five words for snow while the Aztecs had one word for snow-rain-hail combined?
That which we do not have the vocabulary for, we tend not to notice. Those things which we notice, we create a vocabulary for. Through the processes of noticing, vocalizing, pondering and comprehending, we build up an understanding of the world in which we live.
“We speak of attention as noticing. To notice is to select, to regard some bits of perception, or some features of the world, as more noteworthy, more significant, than others. To these we attend, and the rest we ignore – for which reason conscious attention is at the same time ignoreance (i.e., ignorance) despite the fact that it gives us a vividly clear picture of whatever we chose to notice.” [1]
The double process of noticing is governed by:
(1) ‘whatever seems advantageous or disadvantageous for our survival, our social status, and the security of our egos’ and (2) the systems of notation that are ‘learned from others, from our society and our culture.’[2]
Our identity and our survival are connected to the aspects of life that we notice and that we ignore, all of which is intrinsically connected to our language.
Through this vocabulary, and the stories associated with them, we build up a self-centric idea about reality.
In this way languages play a paradoxically liberating and limiting role in our lives.
[1] Watts, Alan (1969). The Book : On the Taboo against Knowing Who You Are. London: Jonathan Cape. p. 35.
What are you looking for? What do you want? If you don’t know, how will you know when you have it?
This was a problem faced after eating a mushroom in Amsterdam. We were walking around aimlessly. We didn’t know what we were looking for! My friend through up her arms, “How are we going to get anywhere if we don’t know where we want to go?!”
A bridge pose wasn’t much of a solution…
I think I’ve been facing a similar problem with my life: how do bridge toward a future without knowing where that future lies? How am I going to get anywhere, if I don’t know where I want to go?
Be it in decisions of travel, career, or love, in the past I have known what I want after I get it. When from out of nowhere I get a strong feeling that something is just “right”. When my mind can’t think of anything else. When my fingers can’t help but pick up a pen and write. When I make a spare-of-the moment decision, buy a plane ticket and everything works out perfectly.
Some decisions feel like they have been made by some version of Self that is outside myself. I can not not do that thing, make that decision, spend time with that person. That’s how I know it’s what I want. I just know.
But what happens when you find yourself in the middle-land? What should you do when your “intuition”, your “higher self”, or your “God” seems to have abandoned you?
There are times in life where one’s intuition doesn’t seem to speak up. Times when everything seems to go wrong. Times where you can’t see your options, times when there seem to be too many. Times when you are confused. Times when you really don’t know what you are looking for. Then what?
Maybe it’s at times like this we need to take our mind back a few steps:
Can you trace your steps backward, like when you lose your keys, and find your “self” again?
When was the last time you felt you knew? How did you get from there to the place you are now?
Could you be in the place you are in order to learn something? What’s the lesson?
Is it time to try something new?
If you’re not happy now is there anything you can change to bring back your happy place?
There are things we have control over, and there are things we don’t. The more aware we are of these, the more chance we have of creating for ourselves the reality we want.
The Footprints poem tells a mythical story of a man walking on the beach looking back at his life in footsteps on the sand. Most of the time there are two sets – his, and “God”s. In the man’s hardest times there is only one set of feet. “God” seems to have abandoned him.
My trip around Europe, peaking with my accident in Greece, left me feeling this way. I was questioning EVERYTHING. I was ready to go back to Sydney. I wanted to be surrounded by my family and friends. I realized how much I missed them. I realized how important they are to my life. I realized how great my life is back in Sydney: my little apartment, the coffee-shops, the beach, ease-of-life. I wanted to go home.
I pushed on with my journey. Arriving in the US I was sick to my stomach with feelings of uncertainty. I was more homesick than I’ve ever been.
“What am I doing with my life?” I kept asking myself. Sure I’m doing a PhD. But why? Do you want to teach? Or do you want to write? Do you want to make money? Or do you want to have a family? Do you want to keep traveling? What’s the point in my doing the things I am doing? Are they taking me where I want to go? Or should I just go home? If I do go home, what will I do when I get there?
A friend of mine recommended I sit down and write at the top of a piece of paper “What is the purpose of Juliet?” Then write everything that comes into my head. “When you break down and cry, you know you have hit something.”
I hit that point pretty quick. This exercise, along with time, and seeing the healing of my physical wounds, has helped my mind return to a more normal place.
Though I don’t know what my next step will be – how long I’ll stay in the US, or where I’ll go next, or when I’ll go home – but I have returned to feeling comfortable with that.
The uncertainty is exciting. An unknown future means anything is possible.
The Footprints poem concludes with “God” saying, “When you saw only one set of footprints, it was then that I carried you.”
It’s a message of faith: of letting go, of acceptance, and trust. Pay attention to everything that is going on around you. Be limber. Be flexible. Open your eyes. Open your mind to options and ideas that you never thought of. Sleep, eat, exercise, meditate. Be merry. We don’t always need to know exactly where we are going.
Maybe it’s times that we feel the most lost and confused that we need to have the most faith. I’m not talking about faith that people think of means believing in a supernatural religious God. But faith in the bigger story we are a part of. Faith that everything going on in our smaller stories will turn out ok. Faith that comes with understanding that in time we will lose some battles, win others, have an apotheosis, discover the ultimate boon, and return to oneness that we first left. Faith that as we continue on our journey, the energy of the universe (call it God or the Great Storyteller or any other name) will carry us to ever-new horizons.
One of those horizons for me … finish editing my book.
In The Hero with a Thousand Faces Joseph Campbell looks at myths and psychology – showing the connection between the stages of the “monomyth” seen in religion, movies and the journey of each of our lives. I’m using this book along with some other Joseph Campbell books and videos for my class…
“The mythological hero, setting forth from his common-day hut or castle, is lured, carried away, or else voluntarily proceeds, to the threshold of adventure. There he encounters a shadow presence that guards the passage. The hero may defeat or conciliate this power and go alive into the kingdom of the dark (brother-battle, dragonbattle; offering, charm), or be slain by the opponent and descend in death (dismemberment, crucifixion). Beyond the threshold, then, the hero journeys through a world of unfamiliar yet strangely intimate forces, some of which severely threaten him (tests), some of which give magical aid (helpers). When he arrives at the nadir of the mythological round, he undergoes a supreme ordeal and gains his reward. The triumph may be represented as the hero’s sexual union with the goddess-mother of the world (sacred marriage), his recognition by the father-creator (father atonement), his own divinization (apotheosis), or again —if the powers have remained unfriendly to him—his theft of the boon he came to gain (bride-theft, fire-theft); intrinsically it is an expansion of consciousness and therewith of being (illumination, transfiguration, freedom). The final work is that of the return. If the powers have blessed the hero, he now sets forth under their protection (emissary); if not, he flees and is pursued (transformation flight, obstacle flight). At the return threshold the transcendental powers must remain behind; the hero re-emerges from the kingdom of dread (return, resurrection). The boon that he brings restores the world (elixir).” p. 227-8.
I wish we had time in class to watch all of this series The Power of Myth with Bill Moyers – the first half of the first video (back to VHS!) was great… definitely worth hunting down a DVD version. Here’s a segment:
I have my class discussing each stage of the “monomyth” / “The Hero’s Journey” in relation to Avatar (everyone has seen and loves) and The Matrix (which half hadn’t seen so we watched in class). Next week is week 4, of 16 weeks. Crazy how fast time is flying by. Anyway enough babbling, here it is – Joseph Campbell’s monomyth:
Departure
1. The Call to Adventure
‘This first stage of the mythological journey—which we have designated the “call to adventure” —signifies that destiny has summoned the hero and transferred his spiritual center of gravity from within the pale of his society to a zone unknown. This fateful region of both treasure and danger may be variously represented: as a distant land, a forest, a kingdom underground, beneath the waves, or above the sky, a secret island, lofty mountaintop, or profound dream state; but it is always a place of strangely fluid and polymorphous beings, unimaginable torments, superhuman deeds, and impossible delight.’ p. 53.
2. Refusal of the Call
‘Often in actual life, and not infrequently in the myths and popular tales, we encounter the dull case of the call unanswered; for it is always possible to turn the ear to other interests. Refusal of the summons converts the adventure into its negative. Walled in boredom, hard work, or “culture,” the subject loses the power of significant affirmative action and becomes a victim to be saved.’ p. 54.
3. Supernatural Aid
‘For those who have not refused the call, the first encounter of the hero-journey is with a protective figure (often a little old crone or old man) who provides the adventurer with amulets against the dragon forces he is about to pass.’ p. 63.
4. The Crossing of the First Threshold
‘With the personifications of his destiny to guide and aid him, the hero goes forward in his adventure until he comes to the “threshold guardian” at the entrance to the zone of magnified power. Such custodians bound the world in the four directions — also up and down—standing for the limits c the hero’s present sphere, or life horizon. Beyond them is dark less, the unknown, and danger; just as beyond the parental watch is danger to the infant and beyond the protection of his society danger to the member of the tribe. The usual person is more than content, he is even proud, to remain within the indicated bounds, and popular belief gives him every reason to fear so much as the first step into the unexplored. Thus the sailors of the bold vessels of Columbus, breaking the horizon of the medieval mind —sailing, as they thought, into the boundless ocean of immortal being that surrounds the cosmos, like an endless mythological serpent biting its tail—had to be cozened and urged on like children, because of their fear of the fabled leviathans, mermaids, dragon kings, and other monsters of the deep.’ p. 71.
5. The Belly of the Whale
The idea that the passage of the magical threshold is a transit into a sphere of rebirth is symbolized in the worldwide womb image of the belly of the whale. The hero, instead of conquering or conciliating the power of the threshold, is swallowed into the unknown, and would appear to have died… here, instead of passing outward, beyond the confines of the visible world, the hero goes inward, to be born again. The disappearance corresponds to the passing of a worshiper into a temple where he is to be quickened by the recollection of who and what he is, namely dust and ashes unless immortal. The temple interior, the belly of the whale, and the heavenly land beyond, above, and below the confines of the world, are one and the same. That is why the approaches and entrances to temples are flanked and defended by colossal gargoyles: dragons, lions, devil-slayers with drawn swords, resentful dwarfs, winged bulls. These are the threshold guardians to ward away all incapable of encountering the higher silences within. They are preliminary embodiments of the dangerous aspect of the presence, corresponding to the mythological ogres that bound the conventional world, or to the two rows of teeth of the whale. They illustrate the fact that the devotee at the moment of entry into a temple undergoes a metamorphosis… His secular character remains without; he sheds it, as a snake its slough. Once inside he may be said to have died to time and returned to the World Womb, the World Navel, the Earthly Paradise. The mere fact that anyone can physically walk past the temple guardians does not invalidate their significance; for if the intruder is incapable of encompassing the sanctuary, then he has effectually remained without. Anyone unable to understand a god sees it as a devil and is thus defended from the approach. Allegorically, then, the passage into a temple and the hero-dive through the jaws of the whale are identical adventures, both denoting, in picture language, the life-centering, life-renewing act.’ p. 83-5.
Initiation
6. The Road of Trials
‘ONCE having traversed the threshold, the hero moves in a dream landscape of curiously fluid, ambiguous forms, where he must survive a succession of trials. This is a favorite phase of the mythadventure. It has produced a world literature of miraculous tests and ordeals. The hero is covertly aided by the advice, amulets, and secret agents of the supernatural helper whom he met before his entrance into this region. Or it may be that he here discovers for the first time that there is a benign power everywhere supporting him in his superhuman passage.’ p. 89.
‘The original departure into the land of trials represented only the beginning of the long and really perilous path of initiator)’ conquests and moments of illumination. Dragons have now to be slain and surprising barriers passed—again, again, and again. Meanwhile there will be a multitude of preliminary victories, unretainable ecstasies, and momentary glimpses of the wonderful land.’ p. 100.
7. The Meeting with the Goddess
‘The ultimate adventure, when all the barriers and ogres have been overcome, is commonly represented as a mystical marriage of the triumphant hero-soul with the Queen Goddess of the World. This is the crisis at the nadir, the zenith, or at the uttermost edge of the earth, at the central point of the cosmos, in the tabernacle of the temple, or within the darkness of the deepest chamber of the heart.’ p. 100.
‘The mythological figure of the Universal Mother imputes to the cosmos the feminine attributes of the first, nourishing and protecting presence. The fantasy is primarily spontaneous; for there exists a close and obvious correspondence between the attitude of the young child toward its mother and that of the adult toward the surrounding material world.’ p. 103.
‘Woman, in the picture language of mythology, represents the totality of what can be known. The hero is the one who comes to know. As he progresses in the slow initiation which is life, the form of the goddess undergoes for him a series of transfigurations: she can never be greater than himself, though she can always promise more than he is yet capable of comprehending. She lures, she guides, she bids him burst his fetters. And if he can match her import, the two, the knower and the known, will be released from every limitation. Woman is the guide to the sublime acme of sensuous adventure. By deficient eyes she is reduced to inferior states; by the evil eye of ignorance she is spellbound to banality and ugliness. But she is redeemed by the eyes of understanding. The hero who can take her as she is, without undue commotion but with the kindness and assurance she requires, is potentially the king, the incarnate god, of her created world.’ p. 106.
8. Woman as the Temptress
‘The mystical marriage with the queen goddess of the world represents the hero’s total mastery of life; for the woman is life, the hero its knower and master. And the testings of the hero, which were preliminary to his ultimate experience and deed, were symbolical of those crises of realization by means of which his consciousness came to be amplified and made capable of enduring the full possession of the mother-destroyer, his inevitable bride. With that he knows that he and the father are one: he is in the father’s place.
‘Thus phrased, in extremest terms, the problem may sound remote from the affairs of normal human creatures. Nevertheless, every failure to cope with a life situation must be laid, in the end, to a restriction of consciousness. Wars and temper tantrums are the makeshifts of ignorance; regrets are illuminations come too late. The whole sense of the ubiquitous myth of the hero’s passage is that it shall serve as a general pattern for men and women, wherever they may stand along the scale. Therefore it is formulated in the broadest terms. The individual has only to discover his own position with reference to this general human formula, and let it then assist him past his restricting walls. Who and where are his ogres”? Those are the reflections of the unsolved enigmas of his own humanity. What are his ideals’? Those are the symptoms of his grasp of life.
‘In the office of the modern psychoanalyst, the stages of the hero-adventure come to light again in the dreams and hallucinations of the patient. Depth beyond depth of self-ignorance is fathomed, with the analyst in the role of the helper, the initiatory priest. And always, after the first thrills of getting under way, the adventure develops into a journey of darkness, horror, disgust, and phantasmagoric fears.
‘The crux of the curious difficulty lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is. Generally we refuse to admit within ourselves, or within our friends, the fullness of that pushing, self-protective, malodorous, carnivorous, lecherous fever which is the very nature of the organic cell. Rather, we tend to perfume, whitewash, and reinterpret; meanwhile imagining that all the flies in the ointment, all the hairs in the soup, are the faults of some unpleasant someone else.
‘But when it suddenly dawns on us, or is forced to our attention, that everything we think or do is necessarily tainted with the odor of the flesh, then, not uncommonly, there is experienced a moment of revulsion: life, the acts of life, the organs of life, woman in particular as the great symbol of life, become intolerable to the pure, the pure, pure soul.’ p. 111-12.
9. Atonement with the Father
‘The paradox of creation, the coming of the forms of time out of eternity, is the germinal secret of the father. It can never be quite explained. Therefore, in every system of theology there is an umbilical point, an Achilles tendon which the finger of mother life has touched, and where the possibility of perfect knowledge has been impaired. The problem of the hero is to pierce himself (and therewith his world) precisely through that point; to shatter and annihilate that key knot of his limited existence. The problem of the hero going to meet the father is to open his soul beyond terror to such a degree that he will be ripe to understand how the sickening and insane tragedies of this vast and ruthless cosmos are completely validated in the majesty of Being. The hero transcends life with its peculiar blind spot and for a moment rises to a glimpse of the source. He beholds the face of the father, understands —and the two are atoned.’ p. 135.
‘Atonement (at-one-ment) consists in no more than the abandonment of that self-generated double monster—the dragon thought to be God (superego) and the dragon thought to be Sin (repressed id). But this requires an abandonment of the attachment to ego itself; and that is what is difficult. One must have a faith that the father is merciful, and then a reliance on that mercy. Therewith, the center of belief is transferred outside of the bedeviling god’s tight scaly ring, and the dreadful ogres dissolve.’ p. 120.
‘The magic of the sacraments (made effective through the passion of Jesus Christ, or by virtue of the meditations of the Buddha), the protective power of primitive amulets and charms, and the supernatural helpers of the myths and fairy tales of the world, are mankind’s assurances that the arrow, the flames, and the flood are not as brutal as they seem. For the ogre aspect of the father is a reflex of the victim’s own ego —derived from the sensational nursery scene that has been left behind, but projected before; and the fixating idolatry of that pedagogical nonthing is itself the fault that keeps one steeped in a sense of sin, sealing the potentially adult spirit from a better balanced, more realistic view of the father, and therewith of the world… It is in this ordeal that the hero may derive hope and assurance from the helpful female figure, by whose magic (pollen charms or power of intercession) he is protected through all the frightening experiences of the father’s ego-shattering initiation. For if it is impossible to trust the terrifying father-face, then one’s faith must be centered elsewhere (Spider Woman, Blessed Mother); and with that reliance for support, one endures the crisis—only to find, in the end, that the father and mother reflect each other, and are in essence the same.’ p. 118-120.
10. Apotheosis
The pause on the threshold of Nirvana, the resolution to forego until the end of time (which never ends) immersion in the untroubled pool of eternity, represents a realization that the distinction between eternity and time is only apparent—made, perforce, by the rational mind, but dissolved in the perfect knowledge of the mind that has transcended the pairs of opposites. What is understood is that time and eternity are two aspects of the same experience-whole, two planes of the same nondual ineffable; i.e., the jewel of eternity is in the lotus of birth and death: om mani padme hum. p. 140.
‘The first wonder to be noted here is the androgynous character of the Bodhisattva: masculine Avalokiteshvara, feminine Kwan Yin. Male-female gods are not uncommon in the world of myth. They emerge always with a certain mystery; for they conduct the mind beyond objective experience into a symbolic realm where duality is left behind. Awonawilona, chief god of the pueblo of Zuni, the maker and container of all, is sometimes spoken of as he, but is actually he-she. The Great Original of the Chinese chronicles, the holy woman T’ai Yuan, combined in her person the masculine Yang and the feminine Yin.”‘ The cabalistic teachings of the medieval Jews, as well as the Gnostic Christian writings of the second century, represent the Word Made Flesh as androgynous- which was indeed the state of Adam as he was created, before the female aspect, Eve, was removed into another form. And among the Greeks, not only Hermaphrodite (the child of Hermes and Aphrodite), but Eros too, the divinity of love (the first of the gods, according to Plato), were in sex both female and male. p. 140-1.
‘”So God created man in his own image, in the image of God created he him; male and female created he them.” The question may arise in the mind as to the nature of the image of God; but the answer is already given in the text, and is clear enough. “When the Holy One, Blessed be He, created the first man, He created him androgynous.” The removal of the feminine into another form symbolizes the beginning of the fall from perfection into duality; and it was naturally followed by the discovery of the duality of good and evil, exile from the garden where God walks on earth, and thereupon the building of the wall of Paradise, constituted of the “coincidence of opposites,” by which Man (now man and woman) is cut off from not only the vision but even the recollection of the image of God.
‘This is the Biblical version of a myth known to many lands. It represents one of the basic ways of symbolizing the mystery of creation: the devolvement of eternity into time, the breaking of the one into the two and then the many, as well as the generation of new life through the reconjunction of the two.’ p. 141-2.
‘Like the Buddha himself, this godlike being is a pattern of the divine state to which the human hero attains who has gone beyond the last terrors of ignorance. “When the envelopment of consciousness has been annihilated, then he becomes free of all fear, beyond the reach of change.’1″‘ This is the release potential within us all, and which anyone can attain—through herohood; for, as we read: “All things are Buddha-things’1;8″3 or again (and this is the other way of making the same statement): “All beings are without self.1’ The world is filled and illumined by, but does not hold, the Bodhisattva (“he whose being is enlightenment”); rather, it is he who holds the world, the lotus. Pain and pleasure do not enclose him, he encloses them—and with profound repose.’ p. 138-9.
11. The Ultimate Boon
‘The ease with which the adventure is here accomplished signifies that the hero is a superior man, a born king. Such ease distinguishes numerous fairy tales and alt legends of the deeds of incarnate gods. Where the usual hero would face a test, the elect encounters no delaying obstacle and makes no mistake. The well is the World Navel, its flaming water the indestructible essence of existence, the bed going round and round being the World Axis. The sleeping castle is that ultimate abyss to which the descending consciousness submerges in dream, where the individual life is on the point of dissolving into undifferentiated energy: and it would be death to dissolve; yet death, also, to lack the fire.
‘The motif (derived from an infantile fantasy) of the inexhaustible dish, symbolizing the perpetual life-giving, form-building powers of the universal source, is a fairy-tale counterpart of the mythological image of the cornucopian banquet of the gods. While the bringing together of the two great symbols of the meeting with the goddess and the fire theft reveals with simplicity and clarity the status of the anthropomorphic powers in the realm of myth. They are not ends in themselves, but guardians, embodiments, or bestowers, of the liquor, the milk, the food, the fire, the grace, of indestructible life.
‘Such imagery can be readily interpreted as primarily, even though perhaps not ultimately, psychological; for it is possible to observe, in the earliest phases of the development of the infant, symptoms of a dawning “mythology” of a state beyond the vicissitudes of time. These appear as reactions to, and spontaneous defenses against, the body-destruction fantasies that assail the child when it is deprived of the mother breast. “The infant reacts with a temper tantrum and the fantasy that goes with the temper tantrum is to tear everything out of the mother’s bod)-. . . . The child then fears retaliation for these impulses, i.e., that
everything will be scooped out of its own inside.”‘ Anxieties for the integrity of its body, fantasies of restitution, a silent, deep requirement for indestructibility and protection against the “bad” forces from within and without, begin to direct the shaping psyche; and these remain as determining factors in the later neurotic, and even normal, life activities, spiritual efforts, religious beliefs, and ritual practices of the adult.’ p. 159-60.
Return
12. Refusal of the Return
‘WHEN the hero-quest has been accomplished, through penetration to the source, or through the grace of some male or female, human or animal, personification, the adventurer still must return with his life-transmuting trophy. The full round, the norm of the monomyth, requires that the hero shall now begin the labor of bringing the runes of wisdom, the Golden Fleece, or his sleeping princess, back into the kingdom of humanity, where the boon may redound to the renewing of the community, the nation, the planet, or the ten thousand worlds. But the responsibility has been frequently refused. Even the Buddha, after his triumph, doubted whether the message of realization could be communicated, and saints are reported to have passed away while in the supernal ecstasy. Numerous indeed are the heroes fabled to have taken up residence forever in the blessed isle of the unaging Goddess of Immortal Being.’ p. 179.
13. The Magic Flight
‘If the hero in his triumph wins the blessing of the goddess or the god and is then explicitly commissioned to return to the world with some elixir for the restoration of society, the final stage of his adventure is supported by all the powers of his supernatural patron. On the other hand, if the trophy has been attained against the opposition of its guardian, or if the hero’s wish to return to the world has been resented by the gods or demons, then the last stage of the mythological round becames a lively, often comical, pursuit. This flight may be complicated by marvels of magical obstruction and evasion.’ p. 182.
‘The myths of failure touch us with the tragedy of life, but those of success only with their own incredibility. And yet, it’s the mono-myth is to fulfill its promise, not human failure or superhuman success but human success is what we shall have to be shown.’ p. 192.
14. Rescue from Without
‘The hero may have to be brought back from his supernatural adventure by assistance from without. That is to say, the world may have to come and get him. For the bliss of the deep abode is not lightly abandoned in favor of the self-scattering of the wakened state. “Who having cast off the world,” we read, “would desire to return again? He would be only there.””‘ And yet, in so far as one is alive, life will call. Society is jealous of those who remain away from it, and will come knocking at the door. If the hero—like Muchukunda—is unwilling, the disturber suffers an ugly shock; but on the other hand, if the summoned one is only delayed —sealed in by the beatitude of the state of perfect being (which resembles death} —an apparent rescue is effected, and the adventurer returns.’ p. 192.
‘This brings us to the final crisis of the round, to which the whole miraculous excursion has been but a prelude—that, namely, of the paradoxical, supremely difficult threshold-crossing of the hero’s return from the mystic realm into the land of common day. Whether rescued from without, driven from within, or gently carried along by the guiding divinities, he has yet to re-enter with his boon the long-forgotten atmosphere where men who are fractions imagine themselves to be complete. He has yet to confront society with his ego-shattering, life-redeeming elixir, and take the return blow of reasonable queries, hard resentment, and good people at a loss to comprehend.’ p. 201.
15. The Crossing of the Return Threshold
‘The two worlds, the divine and the human, can be pictured only as distinct from each other—different as life and death, as day and night. The hero adventures out of the land we know into darkness; there he accomplishes his adventure, or again is simply lost to us, imprisoned, or in danger; and his return is described as a coming back out of that yonder zone. Nevertheless—and here is a great key to the understanding of myth and symbol — the two kingdoms are actually one. The realm of the gods is a forgotten dimension of the world we know. And the exploration of that dimension, either willingly or unwillingly, is the whole sense of the deed of the hero. The values and distinctions that in normal life seem important disappear with the terrifying assimilation of the self into what formerly was only otherness. As in the stories of the cannibal ogresses, the fearfulness of this loss of personal individuation can be the whole burden of the transcendental experience for unqualified souls. But the hero-soul goes boldly in —and discovers the hags converted into goddesses and the dragons into the watchdogs of the gods.
‘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. Hence the common divorce of opportunism from virtue and the resultant degeneration of human existence. Martyrdom is for saints, but the common people have their institutions, and these cannot be left to grow like lilies of the field; Peter keeps drawing his sword, as in the garden, to defend the creator and sustainer of the world. The boon brought from the transcendent deep becomes quickly rationalized into nonentity, and the need becomes great for another hero to refresh the word.
‘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 represent on a two-dimensional surface a three-dimensional form, or in a three-dimensional image a multi-dimensional meaning? How translate into terms of “yes” and “no” revelations that shatter into meaninglessness 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? Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold. The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life. Why re-enter such a world? Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss”? 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. The easy thing is to commit the whole community to the devil and retire again into the heavenly rock-dwelling, close the door, and make it fast. But if some spiritual obstetrician has meanwhile drawn the shimenawa across the retreat, then the work of representing eternity in time, and perceiving in time eternity, cannot be avoided.’ p. 201-4.
16. Master of the Two Worlds
‘Freedom to pass back and forth across the world division, from the perspective of the apparitions of time to that of the causal deep and back—not contaminating the principles of the one with those of the other, yet permitting the mind to know the one by virtue of the other—is the talent of the master. The Cosmic Dancer, declares Nietzsche, does not rest heavily in a single spot, but gaily, lightly, turns and leaps from one position to another. It is possible to speak from only one point at a time, but that does not invalidate the insights of the rest.’ p. 212-3.
‘The myths do not often display in a single image the mystery of the ready transit. Where they do, the moment is a precious symbol, full of import, to be treasured and contemplated. Such a moment was that of the Transfiguration of the Christ… Here is the whole myth in a moment: Jesus the guide, the way, the vision, and the companion of the return. The disciples are his initiates, not themselves masters of the mystery, yet introduced to the full experience of the paradox of the two worlds in one.’ p. 213.
‘Jesus makes the point more succinctly: “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. The Law lives in him with his unreserved consent. Many are the figures, particularly in the social and mythological contexts of the Orient, who represent this ultimate state of anonymous presence. The sages of the hermit groves and the wandering mendicants who play a conspicuous role in the life and legends of the East; in myth such figures as the Wandering Jew (despised, unknown, yet with the pearl of great price in his pocket); the tatterdemalion beggar, set upon by dogs; the miraculous mendicant bard whose music stills the heart; or the masquerading god, Wotan, Viracocha, Edshu: these are examples. “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. 220.
17. Freedom to Live
‘What, now, is the result of the miraculous passage and return”? The battlefield is symbolic of the field of life, where every creature lives on the death of another. A realization of the inevitable guilt of life may so sicken the heart that, like Hamlet or like Arjuna, one may refuse to go on with it. On the other hand, like most of the rest of us, one may invent a false, finally unjustified, image of oneself as an exceptional phenomenon in the world, not guilty as others are, but justified in one’s inevitable sinning because one represents the good. Such self-righteousness leads to a misunderstanding, not only of oneself but of the nature of both man and the cosmos. The goal of the myth is to dispel the need for such life ignorance by effecting a reconciliation of the individual consciousness with the universal will. And this is effected through a realization of the true relationship of the passing phenomena of time to the imperishable life that lives and dies in all. “Even as a person casts off worn-out clothes and puts on others that are new, so the embodied Self casts off worn-out bodies and enters into others that are new. Weapons cut It not; fire burns It not; water wets It not; the wind does not wither It. This Self cannot be cut nor burnt nor wetted nor withered. Eternal, all-pervading, unchanging, immovable, the Self is the same for ever.”
‘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. “Do without attachment the work you have to do…
Surrendering all action to Me, with mind intent on the Self, freeing yourself from longing and selfishness, fight—unperturbed by grief.” p. 221-2.
‘The hero is the champion of things becoming, not of things become, because he is. “Before Abraham was, I AM.” He does not mistake apparent changelessness in time for the permanence of Being, nor is he fearful of the next moment (or of the “other thing”), as destroying the permanent with its change. “Nothing retains its own form; but Nature, the greater renewer, ever makes up forms from forms. Be sure there’s nothing perishes in the whole universe; it does but vary and renew its form.” Thus the next moment is permitted to come to pass. p. 225-6.
All quotes are from:
Campbell, Joseph (1949, 2004) The Hero with a Thousand Faces. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
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A bridge pose wasn’t much of a solution…
