Thursday, December 25, 2008

12/25/08

you were sitting on a circular stone ledge that wrapped around a little pool of water. i had walked by you before and definitely got the eyes. i got occupied with someone else. i came back shortly and sat down. you approached me verbally. you let me know that i looked exactly like ???, a celebrity. i was flattered. i started to exclaim your beauty, but you had had enough. you got up and walked away. you truely, were beautiful.


what is your name.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

jay oh bee

I got a job today. Or at least i interviewed for one. I can't take Kadela's Ethics and Morality now, but I called him and he wished me the best anyway. I will still attend his workshops and everything. I think this will all work out.

Kaplan University. Starting salary at 30k. Then from there, it can increase anywhere from 30 - 42 within the first year. after a year if im doing well, then i can work FROM HOME. which is the main goal. i will be doing admissions work, basically on the phone and computer all day.

When i was on the phone with John (Kadela) he told me i had an A in the class and that my paper was really good. here it is, judge for yourself.

There comes a time in someone’s life, where an immediate connection is made. A connection that runs straight to the core of one’s center and out of this sparks the journey for more; The center being soul and the journey of course, being life. In 1932, Joseph Campbell set out on a road trip across America, and while in Los Angeles, on the complete other side of the country from his home town of White Plains, New York, he realized a journey wasn’t it at all:
I begin to think that I have a genius for working like an ox over totally irrelevant subjects. … I am filled with an excruciating sense of never having gotten anywhere—but when I sit down and try to discover where it is I want to get, I'm at a loss. … The thought of growing into a professor gives me the creeps. A lifetime to be spent trying to kid myself and my pupils into believing that the thing that we are looking for is in books! I don't know where it is—but I feel just now pretty sure that it isn't in books. — It isn't in travel. — It isn't in California. — It isn't in New York. … Where is it? And what is it, after all? (Joseph Campbell Foundation)
Within the introduction of The Hero’s Journey (Cousineau, xv) Campbell goes on to describe “You are the mystery which you are seeking to know.” And with that we have the man that knew these timeless traditions and stories well enough to speak to the masses; through his books, travelling discussions, and interviews, Joseph Campbell showed the underlying connectedness intertwined and woven through all religions and mythology.






A Man of Mythological Proportions: Joseph Campbell


In 1910, Joseph Campbell was six years old when his father took him to Madison Square Garden to see Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show and then to the Museum of Natural History. This sparked Campbell’s interest in Native Americans which would turn into his full blown mythological quest to go around the world. Growing up in New Rochelle, New York, he had nature as his backyard and the Indian lifestyle all around, finding arrowheads and Indian relics buried in the dirt. (Brown, Cousineau, 1990). Campbell spoke of Black Elk, a shaman from the Oglala Sioux, who said “that he had found himself on the central mountain of the world, but that anywhere is the center of the world.” (Brown, Cousineau, 8) With this he is speaking of the universality that nature has to teach us and offer to us. But we judge nature as right or wrong and with ethics that destroy the principles of it. That he says, is “the basic mythological problem.” (Brown, Cousineau, 8)
From 1922 to 1927, Joseph Campbell traveled during the summers with his family through Central America and Europe, and when doing this he was engaged in education. In 1927, he was given a traveling fellowship from Columbia, to go to the University of Paris. Here he met modern artists Picasso, Brancusi, and Klee and literary masters Joyce, Yeats, and Eliot. James Joyce wrote a book named Ulysses in Paris which perfectly portrayed Campbell’s current headache. That being deeply rooted into something (Christianity) and then you start to lose faith within that system. Campbell said it started with biology, specifically the biology of human evolution which was very different from what the Bible teaches in the book of Genesis. Campbell said, “And in those days we were supposed to be believing in this stupid literacy of a text that goes back to the first, second, third, fourth millennium B.C. And how can you go through life with that?” (Brown, Cousineau, 28)
He later became strongly influenced by Sanskrit and the work of Freud, Jung, and Thomas Mann. These later interests were while living in Germany and studying at the University of Munich. Campbell nails something extremely important with this quote from The Hero’s Journey:
“Now what Mann tried to do when he turned to mythology was to reinterpret Genesis in terms of elementary ideas that are implicit in the ethnic ideas of the Bible. It’s a very important task and it’s the only way to translate the Judeo-Christian heritage into a heritage for mankind instead of for a certain group. Do you get my point? It’s a big one. This is what everyone is working on who is trying to retain the positive values that are in this heritage, and at the same time move into a global period of life where we don’t isolate ourselves and say everybody else is worshipping devils.”
Mann did this through his art. Through the ‘erotic irony’ that he played out, meaning that was ruthless, but with love: Campbell referred to it as “the absolutely ruthless eye, which sends the arrow of the correct word to name the fault and on the arrow is the ointment of love.” (Brown, Cousineau, 39) In psychology, you have Jung now, who saw that the energy was the same in all of us. Through this he came up with the collective unconscious. Mythic symbols arise from the same place. Not from a specific person, but from a people. (Brown, Cousineau)
Campbell came from Europe two weekends before the stock market crash of 1929. He went to go back to Colombia to finish his PhD, but ended up leaving that alone. They were not interested in his ideas, and he didn’t feel like being molded by some professor. So Campbell moved up to Woodstock and lived there for five years. He would read for nine hours a day, every day. He lived on no money at all. The next step was his invitation out to Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. He ended up taking a teaching position there and stayed for 38 years. It was an all women college, and this showed Campbell new sides to his own learning of mythology. The female perspective was added which included questions of relativity of life and meaning.
"I got this from the Sanskrit idea, that transcendence is transcendent. Now there are three words that come close to it: sat-chit-ananda, that is: sat is being, chit is consciousness, ananda is bliss. So ananda is the only thing you can be aware of. Follow it and you'll be all right. The probability is that when you follow it everything will work out, even if you think it won't." (Brown, Cousineau, 64)
By following your bliss, you are following your soul’s path. People have been told that heaven and bliss await you after death. Campbell says, “In heaven you will be having such a marvelous time looking at God that you won’t get your own experience at all. That is not the place to have the experience – here is the place to have it.” (Brown, Cousineau, 120)

In between 1985 and 1986 an interview took place between Bill Moyers and Joseph Campbell. It was called the Power of the Myth and was featured on PBS across the nation. It was also edited as a conversational type of book, edited by Betty Flowers. Campbell proves why mythology is important to us as humans. To all of us, not just a single group or anything like that. So, within the first chapter, Myth and the Modern World, Campbell shows that a perfect being would be boring. He says that “That is why some people have a very hard time loving God, because there is no imperfection there. You can be in awe, but that would not be real love. It’s Christ on the cross that becomes loveable.” He goes on to describe that “suffering is imperfection” and that the suffering causes the link to something more human and something relatable. Moyers points out that he finds that what he learned from Campbell’s books was “that what human beings have in common is revealed in myth.” Campbell beautifully returns with what people are really seeking in life. That being the “experience of being alive, so that our life experiences on the purely physical plane will have resonances within our innermost being and reality, so that we actually feel the rapture of being alive.” (5)
Through mythology, we can be shown the true human potential. We can compare ourselves to those heroes and gods and goddesses of the past and live up to morals and values. Moyers asks Campbell at one point, “What happens when a society no longer embraces a powerful mythology?” and Campbell replies with “What we’ve got on our hands.” He tells him to open up the New York Times, and that’s what is left. People not knowing how to behave in a society that they feel they have no place in. (Flowers, 8)
According to the Joseph Campbell Foundation, online, “In 1985, Joe was awarded the National Arts Club Gold Medal of Honor in Literature. At the award ceremony, James Hillman remarked, "No one in our century—not Freud, not Thomas Mann, not Levi-Strauss—has so brought the mythical sense of the world and its eternal figures back into our everyday consciousness." To be able to achieve this kind of goal, when those beings were his idols, must be something that he never saw coming. Joseph Campbell followed his bliss, and so should you.




Sweet. Rushed and done the night before, might I add.

Monday, December 8, 2008

Connected

Joan Roth crashed into my car today in a check cashing store parking lot while i was collecting coins out of my cupholder to pay my library late fee for my book on Socrates. She is a huge part of a spiritual movement. www.thetentproject.org - her website.

all of this i found out when i just googled her name. she didn't really do much damage to my car, not nearly as much as John Guerrero did (hey buddy!) backing out of my driveway and into my car. so i told her i didn't want to call this into her insurance company. so we exchanged information. possible career? maybe.